The Intercept

Today’s Class War Is the 1 Percent Versus the People Just Below Them

Jon Schwarz — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Elon Musk, billionaire and chief executive officer of Tesla, at the Viva Tech fair in Paris on June 16, 2023.

Photo: Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images

What does EloN Musk firing 6,500 people at Twitter have to do with the Writers Guild of America and actors in SAG-AFTRA going on strike? How is Meta axing 21,000 employees connected to more and more doctors wondering if they have to unionize? And how is this all related to Donald Trump taking a government map of Hurricane Dorian’s projected path in 2020 and scrawling on it with a Sharpie?

The answer is that America’s owners have opened a new front in their battle against everyone else, declaring war on the class of technocrats who once were their greatest allies.

In Adam Smith’s famed 1776 disquisition on economics, “The Wealth of Nations,” he ponders the behavior of the “great proprietors” of feudalism. They owned the most valuable property available — i.e., land — and with their income from this property supported a class of attendants and retainers, and, below them, a class of tenants of the land.

But the proprietors gradually lost the taste for this. They eventually wished to consume “the whole surplus produce of their lands … without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

“The Wealth of Nations” is full of this kind of ferocious criticism of the psychology of the powerful, so it’s peculiar how today’s powerful champion the book so frequently. There was even a vogue among male members of the Reagan administration for wearing ties with little pictures of Adam Smith. The most likely explanation here is America’s top apparatchiks don’t waste their time reading stuff.

In any case, Smith’s perspective was generally correct: both about the way societies can develop three different tiers, and the overall view of the people at the top of them. Their vile maxim — all for ourselves and nothing for other people — seems to be reaching a level of virulence Americans haven’t experienced in living memory.

Like feudal England, America has, roughly speaking, three classes. At the top are today’s great proprietors. The basis of their wealth is no longer mainly held in land but in direct ownership of their own businesses plus financial instruments including corporate stocks and bonds. The top 1 percent owns over half of U.S. corporate stock.

The people just below them are no longer attendants and retainers but technocrats. They’re the people who go to school to develop the specialized skills that are necessary to keep society running day to day: doctors, lawyers, scientists, computer programmers, engineers. (Journalists are also technocrats but among the weakest of the group.) The rest of the top 10 percent — i.e., the 9 percent — owns almost all the rest of U.S. corporate stock.

Then there’s everyone else. They’re no longer tenant farmers, but they still have to get up every day and clock in at Home Depot and Walgreens and Chipotle to cultivate the possessions of the great proprietors. This working class has the least leverage and the fewest options.

In retrospect, it’s clear America’s masters of mankind were shocked enough by World War II to dial the vile maxim back. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his 1944 State of the Union address, “Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” Even if you were the son of a National City Bank executive destined to follow in your father’s executive footsteps, you would be able to hear Roosevelt’s message after spending time facedown in the mud on Okinawa, covered in your platoonmate’s viscera.

Thus the great proprietors were willing to share quite a bit with the bottom two classes — for a while. During the three decades after the war, median wages went up hand in hand with productivity. That is, as America overall got richer, so did regular people.

But by the 1970s, the great proprietors had gotten tired of this arrangement. The generation with direct adult experience of how destabilized societies can explode into a worldwide slaughterhouse was retiring and dying.

So the masters of mankind decided to alter the deal vis-à-vis the working class. This was such a gargantuan success, it’s amazing they pulled it off without bloodshed. If the minimum wage had continued to go up in step with productivity, it would now be not $7.25 but about $25 an hour. A recent RAND study found that if the U.S. had remained as equitable as it was in 1975 for the next 43 years through 2018, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would have earned an extra $47 trillion. Instead that money flowed in a great flood to the top.

Meanwhile, the technocratic class watched this process with equanimity. Technocrats generally identify upward, and ally themselves with the great proprietors against everyone else. There had been a proprietor-technocrat peace for a long, long time, with the technocrats having the power to garner a big slice of society’s good things for themselves. This included not just money but also prestige and control over their working lives, even as they served as junior partners in the coalition.

The explosion of new wealth in Silicon Valley had also made the boundaries between the two classes enticingly fuzzy. Bill Gates is the son of Bill Gates Sr., who was a prominent corporate lawyer in Seattle. Billionaire Sean Parker, founder of Napster and the first president of Facebook, is the son of an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But just as America’s masters of mankind got tired of sharing with the U.S. working class, they’ve now become fatigued with their deal with the technocrats.

Something has clearly changed in the psychology of the people at the top of America.

It’s difficult to measure or define this. Like Galadriel at the start of the “Lord of the Rings” movies, you have to feel it in the water and smell it in the air. But something has clearly changed in the psychology of the people at the top of America, as Musk and Trump demonstrate every time they reach for their smartphones and start typing.

It’s partly about money. But the vile maxim is about everything, not just cash. What drives our overlords into a towering rage today is that technocrats still have some power to define reality. And the technocrats keep telling them they can’t have all their heart’s desires instantaneously.

Musk wants to live in a world of berserk ultra-right conspiracism in which all of humanity looks to him for his discoveries about The Truth. When a Twitter engineer explained to him that his engagement was down not because the algorithm was broken, but because people were losing interest in Musk, Musk fired him. Trump wanted to claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, so he just drew that on the map produced by NOAA (where Sean Parker’s father had worked) and made the head of NOAA frightened he’d lose his job. Doctors want to decide what their patients need but are losing that power to private equity.

Right now, we’re just at the start of what will be a titanic war between the masters of mankind and the technocrats. The masters hold most of the cards, including the fact that the technocrats largely don’t understand yet that they’re in a war and are not ready for it. Thus the technocrats will likely be defeated, unless they can do something they’ve never done before: Forge an alliance with the working class.

The post Today’s Class War Is the 1 Percent Versus the People Just Below Them appeared first on The Intercept.

This Week, America Failed to Get Josh Hawley to Feel Shame

Jon Schwarz — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., delivers remarks at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Policy Conference at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C., on June 23, 2023.

Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

This July 4, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley got on Twitter and quoted founding father Patrick Henry. According to Hawley, Henry told the world that “[i]t cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

This immediately generated vast Twitter unhappiness because Henry, while a devout Anglican, never said this.

You might hope Hawley would have absorbed this reality and graciously acknowledged his error. After all, he’s a human being and so presumably can feel shame. He was a history major at Stanford and then got a law degree at Yale. He just wrote a book called “Manhood,” which tells us that to be a man is “to live the truth, to speak the truth, and to live by the truth, always.” The first word in his Twitter bio is “Christian,” and the Ninth Commandment is “thou shalt not bear false witness.”

But you’d hope for this in vain. Expecting basic honesty from Hawley is like expecting an armadillo to fly an F-14. You’re invariably going to be disappointed.

Patrick Henry: “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity,…
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) July 4, 2023

Let’s take a quick cruise through the basic facts here and then speculate about their significance.

Seth Cotlar, a professor of U.S. history at Willamette University, dug up the origins of the spurious Henry quote. The words first appeared in 1956 in a magazine called The Virginian — not attributed to Henry, but as the publication’s own gloss on “the spoken and written words of our noble founders.” To give you a sense of where The Virginian was coming from, Cotlar points out that it dared politicians to speak the plain truth “that the mainspring of the conspiracy to mongrelize white America lies in the powerful, wealthy Jewish organizations.”

How the words of The Virginian transmogrified into the words of Henry and then made the journey into Hawley’s mind is unclear. They appeared in a 1989 book called “The Myth of Separation.” Then, in 2001, a GOP representative from Maryland entered “a sermon given by Dr. Richard Fredericks of the Damascus Road Community Church” into the congressional record, and the sermon attributed the words to Henry. That sermon seems to have subsequently spread widely via email and now appears in many nooks and crannies of the internet.

Beyond Twitter, Hawley was criticized by HuffPost, Talking Points Memo, the New Republic, and Religion News Service. Most significantly, the Kansas City Star editorial board ran an editorial headlined “Josh Hawley Rings in July 4 With Fake Quote With Antisemitic, White Nationalist Roots.”

I did my part by asking Hawley’s communications director whether he was going to correct the false quote. Her only response was, “Relevant tweet thread here to include in your story:”

I’m told the libs are major triggered by the connection between the Bible and the American Founding. For example: “The Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission on earth.” – John Quincy Adams
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) July 5, 2023

“I’m told the libs are major triggered by the connection between the Bible and the American Founding,” wrote Hawley on Twitter. “For example: ‘The Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission on earth.’ – John Quincy Adams.”

I politely repeated my initial question and got no response.

In other words, all our efforts have had no effect. On the contrary, Hawley has doubled down. His new efforts have the advantage of using real quotes, though with the disadvantage of quoting non-Founding Fathers speaking long after the American Revolution.

This is distressing, if you’re the kind of person who still has some faint hope that powerful people might care about reality. It’s worth going through some of the reasons that Hawley’s lack of interest in the truth is especially funny and/or horrifying.

First, take a look at Hawley’s book, “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.” (This is just a figure of speech; I wrote a review of “Manhood” and do not recommend that you take a look at it.) As mentioned above, “Manhood” informs us that real men must “speak the truth” (Page 192). It also says:

“Today’s popular culture … tells you to find ‘your truth’ … Modern liberals say there are no permanent truths, only ‘constructs.’” (Page 28)

“For those of an Epicurean persuasion, [masculinity] impinged on the treasured Epicurean right to define your own truth.” (Page 51)

“Self-regard … will consume your life … You won’t risk incurring the wrath of the powers that be by speaking the truth.” (Page 121)

“I am thankful for the opportunity [as a U.S. senator] — to learn, to serve, and to hold fast to the truth.” (Page 126)

“We don’t tell the truth as we ought to. We disappoint others and ourselves.” (Page 162)

There’s a lot more, but you get the gist. Maybe “Manhood” was ghostwritten and Hawley hasn’t gotten around to reading it.

Then there’s the motto of Yale, Hawley’s law school alma mater. It’s “lux et veritas,” meaning “light and truth.” Clearly, this didn’t make much of an impression on him.

Last but hopefully not least, there’s the Bible. Matthew 19:16-19 reads, “One came and said unto him, ‘Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?’ … Jesus said, ‘Thou shalt do no murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness.’”

Of course, what kind of Christian has time for that nonsense? Especially when there are so many important things to tweet.

The significance of all this is suggestive and quite disturbing. On the one hand, attributing made-up quotes to illustrious figures of the past is a hallowed tradition in American politics. Al Gore and Ronald Reagan have done it enthusiastically, along with many, many others.

But on the other, there’s something that feels new about Hawley’s adamantine refusal to recognize facts, combined with his ridicule of “the libs” for caring about them. The internet has enabled the teeming millions to fact-check falsehoods like this instantly, something that could never be done in the past. If it had been possible decades ago, institutions and cultural norms would probably have forced Hawley to correct himself. But the internet and the self-sustaining cult-like bubbles it creates have also obliterated the power of those institutions and norms. Donald Trump has exploited this most of all, but many ambitious creatures like Hawley are eagerly exploring the trail he blazed.

As George Washington said, “If America ever gets to this point, you guys better watch the fuck out.”

The post This Week, America Failed to Get Josh Hawley to Feel Shame appeared first on The Intercept.

For July 4, Here Are 10 Shockingly Radical Things the Founding Fathers Said

Jon Schwarz — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

The Founding Fathers signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, by John Trumbull in 1819.

Photo Illustration: The Intercept / Getty Images

Americans love to talk about our Founding Fathers, with many of us believing they were infallible geniuses. We can tell this isn’t true just by reading this letter from John Adams to his wife Abigail on July 3, 1776:

The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.

Whoops! Adams thought this because the Second Continental Congress had passed the Lee Resolution on July 2, the day before. The Lee Resolution was actually the first declaration of independence, proclaiming that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown.” But July 4 became the date we celebrate because Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence had more zing.

The Founding Fathers were mindlessly venerated for hundreds of years, until Americans who weren’t rich white men gained some input on this subject. They remain mindlessly venerated on the U.S. right, which loves them in the same way the U.S. right loves Jesus: i.e., without bothering to pay attention to what they actually said. This doesn’t mean the Founding Fathers were like Jesus, and indeed, many of them were standard-issue grotesques. But some of them did make startlingly progressive and even radical statements that later became inconvenient and hence have largely dropped out of history.

It’s true that words are cheap, and these edicts generally were at odds with the actions of their speakers, especially when any of them held formal power. Still, it’s worth remembering what they said, because 1) it illustrates how complicated humans and history are, and 2) it’s fruitful to pull these things out during political arguments.

The founders were wordy guys, and their writing contains lots of what we today would call “bad spelling.” The following quotes also just scratch the surface of their radical statements. If I’ve left any of your favorites out, please let me know, and maybe I can write a sequel next July 4.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), American Printer, Publisher, Author, Inventor, Scientist, Diplomat and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

Photo Illustration: The Intercept/Getty Images

Wealth and Property

In 1783, Benjamin Franklin, who was then the U.S. minister to France, described his perspective on property. This would today place him far to the left of the Democratic Party and would probably cause prominent Republicans to call for his execution:

… the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents & all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity & the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man for the Conservation of the Individual & the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who by their Laws have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms … can have no right to the Benefits of Society who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.

Earlier in his life, Franklin made the case for universal health care, paid for with public money, based on the precepts of Christianity:

The great Author of our Faith, whose Life should be the constant Object of our Imitation, as far as it is not inimitable, always shew’d the greatest Compassion and Regard for the Sick …

This Branch of Charity seems essential to the true Spirit of Christianity; and should be extended to all in general, whether Deserving or Undeserving, as far as our Power reaches. … the great Physician in sending forth his Disciples, always gave them a particular Charge, that into whatsoever City they entered, they should heal All the Sick, without Distinction. …

We are in this World mutual Hosts to each other … how careful should we be not to harden our Hearts against the Distresses of our Fellow Creatures, lest He who owns and governs all, should punish our Inhumanity.

Then again, Franklin said some ugly things about “the poor” and also was concerned the Anglo-Saxon whiteness of the colonies would be contaminated by “swarthy” races such as the French and Swedes.

In 1776, Adams endorsed the concept of false consciousness, i.e., that lower economic classes adopt the perspective of those at the top. Friedrich Engels later made that same argument, and it’s now considered a Marxist idea, but as the words of Adams show, it’s as American as you can get:

Such is the Frailty of the human Heart, that very few Men, who have no Property, have any Judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they are directed by Some Man of Property, who has attached their Minds to his Interest.

At the same time, Adams also proposed a solution — the redistribution of property:

[P]ower always follows property. This I believe to be as infallible a maxim in politics, as that action and reaction are equal is in mechanics. Nay, I believe we may advance one step farther, and affirm that the balance of power in a society accompanies the balance of property in land. The only possible way, then, of preserving the balance of power on the side of equal liberty and public virtue is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society; to make a division of the land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates. If the multitude is possessed of the balance of real estate, the multitude will have the balance of power, and in that case the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue, and interest of the multitude in all acts of government.

Gouverneur Morris, a less-famous founder, wrote the preamble to the Constitution, was one of its signatories, and later became a senator from New York. At the Constitutional Convention, he said this about the danger the U.S. would face from the wealthy:

The Executive Magistrate should be the guardian of the people, even of the lower classes, [against] Legislative tyranny, against the Great & the wealthy who in the course of things will necessarily compose the Legislative body. Wealth tends to corrupt the mind & to nourish its love of power, and to stimulate it to oppression. History proves this to be the spirit of the opulent.

America’s children would definitely be more interested in history if they knew this, and also that Morris died when he experienced a urinary blockage and stuck a whalebone up his penis.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Third President of the United States 1801-09.

Photo Illustration: The Intercept/Getty Images

Slavery

Of the first 12 presidents of the U.S., 10 enslaved other human beings. (The exceptions were Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams.) In private, they occasionally decried the practice. Near the end of George Washington’s life, he purportedly said that “[t]he unfortunate condition of the persons, whose labor in part I employed, has been [my] only unavoidable subject of regret.”

Most significantly, Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence indicted King George III for the presence of slavery in the colonies:

[H]e has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

It’s bizarre that Jefferson, who himself owned 600 people over the course of his life, blamed someone else for the existence of slavery. Morally and intellectually, power does not bring out the best in people, as Jefferson himself expressed in one of the greatest veiled self-indictments in history. But the strength of his condemnation demonstrates that everyone understood at the time that what they were doing was pure evil.

Decades later, Jefferson recalled that this passage had been “struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.” I.e., the South employed slavery to a far greater degree than the North, but the North profited enormously from the slave trade.

James Madison (1751-1836), Fourth President of the United States 1809-17.

Photo Illustration: The Intercept/Getty Images

The Power and Promise of Education

At the time of the American Revolution, elites across the world believed that they were inherently intellectually superior to the lower classes and had to be in charge for the good of everybody. But some Founding Fathers adopted the then-radical position that all people could learn how the world works and participate in their own governance. In 1822, James Madison, who’d been president until 1817, wrote this letter to William T. Barry, then the lieutenant governor of Kentucky:

The liberal appropriations made by the Legislature of Kentucky for a general system of Education cannot be too much applauded. A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. …

Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.

I wish I could force you to read the whole thing because it’s an inspiring manifesto about the liberatory power of education, as well as uncannily relevant given the current loathing of education and universities on the right. On the other hand, both Madison and Barry enslaved other human beings, so I don’t know what to tell you.

A year later, in 1823, Jefferson wrote a letter to Adams. I find Jefferson’s faith in the upside of new information technology to be touching, especially here in the early days of the internet. I’m not sure he was right, but I’d like to believe he was:

The light which has been shed on mankind by the art of printing has eminently changed the condition of the world. as yet that light has dawned on the midling classes only of the men of Europe. The kings and the rabble of equal ignorance, have not yet recieved it’s rays; but it continues to spread. And, while printing is preserved, it can no more recede than the sun return on his course. … all will attain representative government … to attain all this however rivers of blood must yet flow, & years of desolation pass over, yet the object is worth rivers of blood, and years of desolation. For what inheritance, so valuable, can man leave to his posterity?… You and I shall look down from another world on these glorious atchievements to man, which will add to the joys even of heaven.

The Electoral College

Today it’s somehow become conventional wisdom on the right that the electoral college was put into the Constitution to give rural states a greater weight in presidential elections. But at the Constitutional Convention, Madison explained why the electoral college was an unfortunate necessity. It would be best for the president to be elected by popular vote, he said, but the South would never allow it, both because they allowed fewer white people to vote and because they had enslaved so much of their population:

The people at large was in his opinion the fittest [choice to elect the president] in itself. It would be as likely as any that could be devised to produce an Executive Magistrate of distinguished Character. … There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

Inoculation

Smallpox was once a terrifying scourge across the world, with a death rate among those infected of 30 percent. By 1720, the practice of inoculation, a predecessor to vaccination, had been introduced in the British colonies. However, one of Franklin’s sons died of smallpox in 1736. Soon afterward, Franklin wrote in the Pennsylvania Gazette about cruel rumors that his child had died not because he wasn’t inoculated against smallpox, but from the inoculation itself:

Understanding ’tis a current Report, that my Son Francis, who died lately of the Small Pox, had it by Inoculation; and being desired to satisfy the Publick in that Particular; inasmuch as some People are, by that Report (join’d with others of the like kind, and perhaps equally groundless) deter’d from having that Operation perform’d on their Children, I do hereby sincerely declare, that he was not inoculated, but receiv’d the Distemper in the common Way of Infection: And I suppose the Report could only arise from its being my known Opinion, that Inoculation was a safe and beneficial Practice.

At the end of his life, Franklin was still desperate to tell parents in his autobiography that they should use human knowledge to prevent disease.

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the smallpox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret, that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the stake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it.

Human Nature

In America’s early days, as now, there were many people at the top of society who simply didn’t believe that regular human beings could govern themselves, and hence they had to be controlled by their betters. Such people nonetheless felt compelled by political necessity — then as now — to deliver constant rhetoric about the wisdom of common folk. In 1824, two years before Jefferson’s death, he wrote to a correspondent about the reality behind these disingenuous homilies:

Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties. 1. those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2dly those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them cherish and consider them as the most honest & safe, altho’ not the most wise depository of the public interests. in every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. call them therefore liberals and serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, whigs and tories, republicans and federalists, aristocrats and democrats or by whatever name you please; they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. the last appellation of artistocrats and democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all.

It’s unquestionable that both of the main political parties in the U.S. now are controlled by people who are, in Jefferson’s formulation, aristocrats.

Again, the Founding Fathers did not know everything. In addition to that embarrassing mistake about July 2, Adams supposedly whispered, “Jefferson still lives,” as he died on July 4, 1826. In fact, Jefferson had expired several hours previously.

But you have to admit it’s cool they both died 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence. The founders weren’t saints or heroes, but the fact some of them could think such radical thoughts 250 years ago should teach us not to fear thinking and debating such radical things today.

The post For July 4, Here Are 10 Shockingly Radical Things the Founding Fathers Said appeared first on The Intercept.

Prigozhin and Putin: Dead Men Walking

James Risen — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 21:23:30 +0000

Head of the Wagner Group Yevgeny Prigozhin leaves the Southern Military District headquarters on June 24, 2023, in Rostov-on-Don, Russia.

Photo: Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Yevgeny Prigozhin is a dead man walking. But so is Vladimir Putin.

In an insane series of events over the weekend, Russian mercenary leader Prigozhin launched what appeared to be a coup against Putin’s regime, marching his Wagner Group mercenaries from their positions in Ukraine, where they had been fighting alongside the Russian military, into Russia. They seized control of Rostov-on-Don, a key military hub, before marching north to Moscow. Prigozhin and his troops met little resistance from the Russian military; he seemed poised to enter the capital and seize power. Nothing would stop him, he said, vowing that “we will go to the end.”

But his bravado didn’t last long. Just as Wagner forces were closing in on Moscow Saturday, Prigozhin suddenly reversed himself. He cut a deal with the Russian president, brokered by Alexander Lukashenko — Belarus’s autocratic leader and a close Putin ally — and announced that his troops would turn back. Prigozhin agreed to leave Russia and go into a sort of exile in Belarus, while Putin agreed to drop a charge of armed rebellion against Prigozhin and grant immunity to his men in connection with the rebellion. Some Wagner forces seem likely to be integrated into the Russian army.

It is still not certain what Saturday’s deal really means and whether it represents an end to the crisis or merely a short-term tactical shift in an ongoing duel between Prigozhin and Putin. But one thing is clear: Prigozhin lost his nerve on Saturday. He had a golden opportunity to seize power at a moment when Putin was surprised and vulnerable. The Russian military had many of its resources in Ukraine rather than Russia, and Wagner’s heavily armed forces had at least the potential to outgun the remaining Russian security services guarding Moscow.

But Prigozhin’s moment was fleeting. Now the odds are good that Putin will have his rival murdered. The Russian leader has had opponents thrown out of windows for far less. To think that Lukashenko, a Putin stooge, will protect Prigozhin in Belarus is madness. Moscow has a long reach; Putin has had plenty of opponents assassinated in the West, and Minsk, the capital of Belarus, might as well be a suburb of Moscow.

If Prigozhin believes Putin will abide by their deal, he isn’t thinking straight — which may be why he launched the coup attempt in the first place.

But Putin is a dead man walking, too, because his tenuous hold on power has now been exposed to the world. Prigozhin’s rebellion has revealed that Putin’s regime is a hollow shell and doesn’t really have a monopoly on violence in Russia.

On Saturday, Putin gave an angry national address, calling Prigozhin’s rebellion treasonous and “a stab in the back of our country and our people.” But just a few hours later, he negotiated the settlement with Prigozhin. Putin’s actions showed the Russian people and the rest of the world that when confronted by a powerful adversary, he will blink. That is certainly the lesson now being absorbed by leaders in Ukraine and at NATO.

Putin’s only play to remain in power may be to have Prigozhin murdered once he settles into exile in Belarus. Prigozhin, meanwhile, may be condemned to await his assassin, even as he wonders what might have been.

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Trump's “Final Battle”

Jon Schwarz — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 12:10:32 +0000

Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Dayton International Airport on Nov. 7, 2022, in Vandalia, Ohio.

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Since Donald Trump left the White House, he’s been developing some new material that reached its apogee in a speech he delivered soon after his indictment for mishandling classified documents. Take a listen to this part, as the former president of the United States — and current frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination — tells us that “at the end of the day, either the Communists destroy America, or we destroy the Communists.”

At another point in the same speech, Trump proclaimed, “This is the final battle. With you at my side … we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists.”

He’s made similar remarks on many occasions. Here he is haranguing us about the Marxists and communists:

Screenshot: The Intercept

Last November he was musing about how “the problem we have is that we are headed toward communism. … There’s never been a period of time like that in our country’s history. And that’s the way communism starts. And we can’t let it happen.”

This fixation on “communism” has also been seeping into the right at large. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s fellow Republican presidential candidate, recently signed a law designating November 7 as “Victims of Communism Day.” The point, he said, was “to ensure that history does not repeat itself.”

For its part, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that was once staid and corporate, is frothing at the mouth. In a recent report, it explained that “many Americans and others around the globe justifiably believed that communism had been defeated,” but “cultural Marxism today presents a far more serious and existential threat to the United States than did Soviet communism.” You might have thought it was bad when Russia had 45,000 nuclear weapons, but that was but a mere bagatelle compared to pronouns in Twitter bios.

The ranty, shouty, red-faced rage of this has made my brain feel itchy indeed. Just a few days ago, I was compelled to open up several cardboard boxes of my late grandfather’s keepsakes. Past the plaque from the University of Illinois Ma-Wan-Da Honor Society, past a crumbly notebook of clippings of his coverage of the aeronautics industry in the Chicago Daily News, past a photograph of him and my grandmother petting a lion on a carefully mown Hollywood lawn, past a teacup emblazoned with the Nazi eagle and swastika that he brought home from World War II, I found what I was looking for: the May 2, 1945, Paris edition of Stars and Stripes.

The headline understandably takes up half the front page: “HITLER DEAD.”

Photo: Jon Schwarz

Every aspect of this historical artifact is compelling to me. It cost one franc. It’s the Paris edition because my grandfather, then a U.S. Army captain, was there, where he’d been assigned to run the 19th arrondissement. This job consisted of trying to find whoever was in charge of the 19th arrondissement before the war and urging them to be in charge again.

Almost every story describes mass human slaughter. “1,500 Japs Die in Fierce Fight Outside Shuri.” There’s the firebombing of Hamamatsu, “in which not a Superfort was lost.” Also, Benito Mussolini was “buried nude” in a potter’s grave. But then there’s page seven with the comics, including Dick Tracy, Blondie, Joe Palooka, Li’l Abner, and Abbie an’ Slats. There’s even a tiny lost and found section, which, in the midst of World War II, speaks of a truly optimistic spirit.

But I was searching for it to read the story about Adolf Hitler again, specifically the words of Karl Dönitz. Dönitz was a German admiral who became leader of the Reich after Hitler shot himself on his sofa. Stars and Stripes reports that Dönitz said this in a radio broadcast to his countrymen:

My first task is to save the German people from destruction by Bolshevism. …

Adolf Hitler recognized beforehand the terrible danger of Bolshevism and devoted his life to fighting it. …

His battle against the Bolshevik flood benefited not only Europe but the whole world. …

The British and Americans do not fight for the interest of their own people but for the spreading of Bolshevism.

Then Stars and Stripes dismisses this in a single sentence fragment with a pair of scare quotes. Dönitz, it tells us, was “harping on Hitler’s old theme of the Red ‘menace.’”

Photo: Jon Schwarz

There were three things that struck me about this. First, there’s the useful reminder of the central place of communism in the Nazi cosmology. They weren’t embroiled in a titanic battle against a simple Jewish conspiracy but rather a more complex Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. Sometimes there was even more to it, and they spoke of an international Judeo-Masonic-Communist enemy. And obviously this wasn’t just Hitler, as Dönitz demonstrated with his post-Hitler soliloquy. An obsession with the towering communist threat was absolutely central for Nazi motivational speakers.

Second, there’s the casualness with which Stars and Stripes brushed Dönitz’s words aside. In 1945, American liberalism was at the heights of its popularity and confidence, confidence and popularity that it would never again match. This wasn’t in the Liberal New York Times or the Liberal Washington Post, but in Stars and Stripes. We’ve heard all of this jabbering before, it says in a tone of boredom, and we don’t need to waste any time on it.

The third thing was what sent me hunting for the paper in the first place: how, in 1945, Dönitz sounded exactly the same as the leaders of the Republican Party today. Here’s what Trump recently said again:

“At the end of the day, either the Communists destroy America, or we destroy the Communists.”

And here are more of Dönitz’s words:

“It is my first task to save the German people from destruction by the Bolsheviks.”

It’s tough to know how exactly to feel about this. It may be the case that ultra-right wing political rhetoric always reaches this destination, but only occasionally explodes in a farrago of mass murder.

Obviously it’s also true that ferocious anti-communism was the organizing principle of U.S. foreign and (partly) domestic policy from the late 1940s to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. And during the period of the Red Scare, there was a great deal of right-wing bloviation about communism indistinguishable from that of today.

However, after the fading of McCarthyism, the frequency and intensity of this kind of language faded too, at least in the heights of the political system. One of Dwight Eisenhower’s aides spoke of how he should model “vigilance without fanaticism” about communism. U.S. policy remained reactionary. But rarely did top figures erupt with the fury and venom that we see today, especially directed toward other Americans.

In addition, the U.S. right has always been controlled by corporate America. And while our most advanced businesspeople have sometimes been fascism-curious, they’ve usually drawn the lines at death camps, perhaps because they don’t want to kill off too many customers. Most importantly, Nazism seems to require lots of energy, and I personally suspect America is now too old and fat for it. You can’t have effective torch-lit rallies when all the attendees need mobility scooters.

And yet — as I look at this soft, dusty newsprint, currently two inches from my elbow, I feel someone walking over my grave. Something truly unwholesome is growing on the U.S. right, a story that they’re telling themselves, a slow accretion of fantasies that is giving them permission to do something. It makes me feel that this newspaper has traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, though uncounted attics, and across 78 years of time, to say something to us. What I hear is that the humans of 1945 were exactly the same kind of creatures as we are today, and we should understand that as though our lives depend on it.

The post Trump’s “Final Battle” appeared first on The Intercept.

A Year After Dobbs, the Anti-Abortion Right Is Grilling Doctors on Tattoos, Tweets, and Too-Strong Beliefs

Judith Levine — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Dr. Caitlin Bernard in Indianapolis on Sept. 28, 2022.

Photo: Kaiti Sullivan for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Some three hours into the 14-hour inquisition of Dr. Caitlin Bernard before the Indiana physician’s licensing board, the assistant attorney general asked her an odd question: “Do you have a tattoo of a coat hanger that says, ‘Trust women,’ on your body?”

It was hard to tell which part offended him more: the coat hanger or “trust women.”

Bernard’s attorney objected to the question as irrelevant. And legally speaking, it was. For the record, Bernard does have such a tattoo, on her left foot, inked years ago to remind her of life in the bad old days. She is not ashamed of it.

But the question was certainly not an opening for the doctor to express pride in her profession and her advocacy of reproductive health care. It was not meant to seek information. Nor was the query a misstep. The interrogator, Cory Voight, was on a mission to prove this respected OB-GYN unfit to practice medicine.

But, it seemed, even that was not enough. As the surrogate for his boss, the fiercely anti-abortion Indiana state Attorney General Todd Rokita, Voight wanted to tear the defendant down emotionally and in the eyes of the public. Asking a woman in a professional hearing about a mark on her body — using the word “body” — was part of a larger strategy, one long deployed by anti-abortion forces against abortion-seekers. Now they’re using it against providers and advocates as well. The strategy is humiliation.

Bernard’s trial, at the May 25 meeting of Indiana’s physician’s licensing board, was the latest chapter in Rokita’s yearlong smear campaign. In June 2022, just after the Dobbs decision triggered the misnamed “fetal heartbeat” abortion ban in Ohio, Bernard performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim from that state. She told a local reporter the girl’s age, gestational stage, and state of origin, not her name or any other identifying details. She spoke again at a reproductive rights rally, warning that thousands of Indianans, including children, would be subject to similar, unnecessary trauma should the state pass an abortion ban in an upcoming special session. The case became national news. Bernard was celebrated as a hero.

Rokita was apoplectic. First, he circulated the calumny that Bernard had invented the patient. When it turned out the patient existed and a suspected perpetrator was arrested, Rokita cast around for laws Bernard might have broken. He came up with another false allegation — that she’d violated patient privacy and reporting laws — and petitioned the board to revoke her license. To do the job, Rokita sent the slimy-mouthed Voight. During the trial, many of his questions began, “Isn’t it true that …”

In another volley of questions, attempting to show that Bernard used the rape victim as a political tool, Voight declared, “No physician has been as brazen in pursuit of their own agenda.” “Brazen” is another one of those words, evoking “brazen hussy.” “She is unfit to practice medicine.” Morally unfit, that is.

Bernard is tough. She has withstood years of harassment and threats of violence against both her and her family. But several times during the hours of insinuation about her allegedly selfish, rash, and illegal conduct, the doctor was reduced to tears.

The IndyStar called the trial “persecution not prosecution.” After leading questions from a board member about the mushrooming media attention, including national news in which the alleged rapist’s identity and address were revealed, Bernard allowed that it might have been wise to describe her patient more elliptically — a sort of forced confession that she’d inadvertently harmed the child.

In the end, the board did not defrock the doctor. It did, however, find Bernard in violation of patient privacy laws and fined her $3,000 — permanent stains on her record. Arguably, her ordeal burnished her esteem among physicians, who decried her censure. Rokita did not break her.

But the champions of forced motherhood scored a point. The principled, trusted, and nationally respected Bernard was humiliated.

Dr. Leah Torres poses for a portrait at the West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on March 15, 2022.

Photo: Allen G. Breed/AP

In 2020, Alabama abortion doctor Leah Torres was also punished by that state’s medical board for speaking out. In a moment of frustration two years earlier, asked by yet another troll if she heard the fetuses screaming when she aborted them, Torres sent off an angry tweet. Fired from a job in Utah, she had been invited to join the staff at the West Alabama Women’s Center, the only abortion provider for hundreds of miles around. Not two weeks into her employment, the state board charged her with lying on her medical license application about everything from her mental health to her intention to treat Covid-19 patients. She was also accused of making “public statements related to the practice of medicine which violate the high standards of honesty, diligence, prudence, and ethical integrity demanded from physicians licensed to practice in Alabama” — most likely a reference to the 2018 tweet.

“I felt like a child being reprimanded.”

In an unusual move, the state suspended Torres’s license during the investigation and through the end of the hearing. Seven months of earning nothing while incurring thousands of dollars in legal debt.

The committee that reviewed the board’s allegations did not concur with them. Nevertheless, they found that parts of Torres’s application “were suggestive of deceptive answers and a lack of ethical integrity.” She was required to take an ethics course and pay $4,000 in administrative fees to the board. Like Bernard’s, Torres’s reputation was tarred.

Also like Bernard, Torres was publicly humiliated. When investigators first came to her office to deliver the charges, they left with her physical license. “I felt like a child being reprimanded,” Torres told The Guardian.

Sometimes it appears that people in power are making their petitioners grovel simply because they can. Such nastiness was on display in May at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, during oral arguments regarding the case in which federal District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruled that the Food and Drug Administration had wrongly approved mifepristone more than 20 years ago, raising the prospect of the abortion drug’s removal from the market nationally.

After a series of weird conjectures and uninformed queries, Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod set upon Jessica Ellsworth, attorney for drug distributor Danco Laboratories, for perceived rudeness in the company’s brief. Introducing the scolding session with her opinion that the filings contained “rather unusual remarks” that “we don’t normally see from very esteemed counsel,” Elrod proceeded to quote from the brief: “defied longstanding precedent,” “an unprecedented judicial assault,” “the court’s relentless one-sided narrative.” She went on.

Might the authors have been “under a rush,” perhaps “exhausted from this whole process,” the judge asked in sweetly assaultive tones. Did counsel “want to say anything about that?”

Ellsworth defended the language as reflecting the extraordinarily politicized nature of the ruling. Elrod persisted, offering alternative, politer phrasing. “Do you think it’s appropriate to attack the district court personally?” she prompted. “I wanted to give you a chance to comment on that.”

It was not an attack on the judge, Ellsworth replied. It was a critique of the court, the decision. But Elrod would not let up, and finally, the lawyer submitted. “I certainly think with more time, we may have ratcheted down some of that,” she said.

Penitence extracted from the prideful child, Judge James Ho took over with his own recital of sins, this time the FDA’s.

As both the method and the goal of misogynists, racists, abusers, tyrants, torturers, and the systems that uphold their power, humiliation can be its own reward. But it is not merely a social tool, and it does not act alone. Humiliation, along with shame and fear, are produced by and in turn fortify the laws that intrude on intimate life, control bodies, and punish those who resist. Together, restrictive laws and destructive emotions create the disciplinary environment that the right’s culture warriors have prayed and labored toward for decades.

Laws abridging bodily autonomy — bathroom patrols and genital inspections of student athletes, compulsory sonograms and lectures intended to get abortion patients to change their minds — intentionally humiliate their subjects, and always have. People seeking legal abortions in pre-Roe America, for instance, were required to seek approval from a (usually all-male) hospital board. Often, the winning plea was one of mental instability or suicidality — that is, self-incriminating evidence of the pregnant woman’s unfitness to mother.

Now activist public servants like Rokita and the members of politically appointed medical boards can turn to legislators to give their personal vendettas the force of law. Abortion remains legal in Indiana while a near-total ban is enjoined pending legal resolution, but confusion and fear about the law have reduced the number of abortions there precipitously. Alabama defines abortion as a Class A felony, carrying penalties of up to 99 years. West Alabama Women’s Center now provides comprehensive reproductive care, minus abortion, to low-income clients. Its staff is demoralized, and the clinic is struggling to stay afloat.

How do you fight an emotion? One way is to turn it around on its evokers.

A group of abortion rights comedians called Abortion Access Front have been staging political theater aimed at puncturing the confidence of the men legislating things they know nothing about: notably, women’s bodies. Their “Send in the Gowns” campaign encourages women to leave voicemails with as many gynecological details as possible, addressing the lawmakers as what they pretend to be. “Hi. Hello. This message is for Dr. Nutt,” begins Beth Stelling, calling South Carolina state Republican Rep. Roger Nutt. “I am lucky enough to have a womb [but] I do need advice because I don’t want to go to prison!” Her voice is both cheerful and earnest. “So the person I was making out with can’t stay hard with a condom, and it’s like, if I consent to the raw-dog activity and I get pregnant — I’m not on birth control, by the way, because it gave me anxiety, depression, dark patches of skin on my face …” In Tennessee, Abortion Access Front activists showed up at statehouse offices for medical “appointments” in hospital gowns.

In Florida, defenders of reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights have taken to tossing large, white, women’s panties emblazoned with political messages — “pantygrams” — at those responsible for the excrement issuing from the state’s legislative body. One such missive missile, launched by Bonnie Patterson-James at a May protest, landed near a county sheriff, who claimed it bounced and hit him on the leg. Patterson-James was arrested and charged with felony battery of a law enforcement officer. She was also among the protesters who panty-pelted legislators from the gallery of the Florida House while they debated the bill banning gender-affirming care. Weeks after the event, several participants were arrested; Guerdy Remy, a nurse who has run for local office, turned herself in and was cuffed, booked, and locked up in county jail before being released on $500 bail six hours later.

The arrests were part of Florida’s crackdown on dissent, particularly at the Capitol, which accounted for over 30 arrests during the 60-day legislative session. “They’re arresting them for tossing panties,” commented a spokesperson for the Florida Freedom to Read Project. “Seems Ron DeSantis and his administration are the ones who have gotten their panties in a twist.”

One of the demonstrators told the Orlando Sentinel that the arrests were payback for embarrassing the governor and the legislature — and a sign of the action’s success. Embarrassment may seem a weak rejoinder to systematic humiliation. But it’s a form of refusal to kneel — and that is the only way to pull the powerful down from on high.

The post A Year After Dobbs, the Anti-Abortion Right Is Grilling Doctors on Tattoos, Tweets, and Too-Strong Beliefs appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump’s Mistake Was Committing Small Crimes by Himself

Jon Schwarz — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 17:42:28 +0000

Newspapers’ front pages displayed in a newsstand on June 9, 2023, in Bedminster, N.J.

Photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez

I may have let out a weird animalistic hoot of joy when the news broke that former President Donald Trump had been indicted on federal charges. There’s something about Trump’s essence that maddens all former children who long ago always did the assigned reading, only to see their lazy bully classmate bloviate their way into the Ivy League thanks to their rich dad. “At long last he’s paying the price for not following the rules,” we think.

And yet, there’s something discordant about hearing from the New York Times that this is “the first time a former U.S. president has faced federal charges.” The Washington Post made the same point, with a subheadline saying, “Political earthquake as GOP frontrunner is now first ex-president indicted by the DOJ.”

Your disquiet may grow if you truly consider that no U.S. president has ever been impeached, convicted, and removed from office. Richard Nixon was not even impeached; he resigned before the House could vote after the Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment. Bill Clinton was impeached, and Trump was impeached (twice), but both were acquitted in their Senate trials.

How can this be? Trump is extremely bad, and honestly, I’m still smiling today as I imagine him screaming, “UNFAIR!” at the squirrels on his New Jersey golf course. But it makes no sense to believe he’s the only president in American history who’s ever acted so maliciously that he deserves to face potential consequences.

To understand this, you might want to read “Murder on the Orient Express,” the 1934 mystery by Agatha Christie.

In the novel, detective Hercule Poirot boards the famous train in Istanbul. There are only 14 other passengers in first and second class. On the second night, the train is forced to stop in Croatia due to a huge snowdrift, and the next morning, a businessperson named Samuel Ratchett is discovered dead in his cabin, indicating that the killer must still be on board.

The evidence is peculiar. Ratchett has been stabbed 12 times, but some of the wounds appear to have been inflicted by someone who’s right-handed, and some appear to be from someone left-handed. Some came from someone extremely strong, some from someone weak. And a fusillade of other clues all point to different suspects on the train.

Poirot considers it all and then gathers all the possible suspects together, along with his friend who’s a top executive of the railroad line. He suggests two theories of the case:

1. The victim was murdered by someone who’s no longer on the train, who somehow got on board and then escaped unnoticed.

2. Ratchett was murdered by everyone. All the passengers had a motive to kill him, each one stabbed him, and no individual can rationally be held responsible separate from the others.

Poirot says he’ll let his friend decide which theory makes the most sense. After pondering it briefly, his friend says it must have been the unknown stranger and that’s what he’ll tell the police.

This is American politics — and politics generally — in miniature and why it’s nearly impossible for societies to punish the perpetrators of great crimes: Anything terrible on a large scale demands broad elite endorsement and participation. When it comes to major evils, most people at the top must be guilty for it to happen in the first place. And so everyone gets away with it.

Think about the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson and Nixon were most responsible for it, murdering perhaps two to four million people across Indochina. (We don’t have a more exact number because we’ve never cared enough to make a serious effort to find out.)

But achieving this body count, far greater than any serial killer could ever dream of, obviously required buy-in from far more people than just these two presidents. How could any legitimate justice process convict just Johnson and Nixon? The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed in the House of Representatives 416-0 and in the Senate 88-2. Congress affirmatively voted to fund the war for years.

Or take the war on terror, which appears to have caused 4.5 million deaths. The post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force flew through Congress with only a lone House member voting against it. Even Bernie Sanders voted yes. 296 members of the House and 77 senators voted for war with Iraq. As in “Murder on the Orient Express,” there was a lot of stabbing by a lot of people.

This dynamic holds true to an extent even when a society is conquered. The Nuremberg trial process included prosecutions beyond the most famous Nazi officials. But of over 3,000 potential cases, most were dropped, and by the 1950s, those sentenced to prison had almost all been released — because the U.S. needed German elites to help us run Germany. The trials of Japanese war criminals were even less consequential for the same reasons, with Emperor Hirohito explicitly excluded from any responsibility.

However, it is occasionally possible for societies to address minor crimes that major figures commit by themselves or with a small circle of cronies. Probably Trump’s most significant crime was his support for the Saudi war on Yemen, which has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. But Trump shares his guilt with a large chunk of the U.S. political system, so that’s fine. It’s the hush money for Stormy Daniels and mishandling of classified documents that have tripped him up.

I hate taking away from anyone’s enjoyment of Trump’s troubles, especially given the shameless delight that they’ve brought me. I understand the temptation to look at what’s happening and believe that the system works. The problem is that this is correct: The system is working — it’s just not anything resembling a system of justice.

Correction: June 9, 2023, 3:16 p.m. ET

A previous version of this article misstated the circumstances of Richard Nixon’s resignation.

The post Trump’s Mistake Was Committing Small Crimes by Himself appeared first on The Intercept.

The Debt Limit Bill: Yet Another Triumph for Bipartisanship

Jon Schwarz — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 2, 2023.

Photo: Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images

This weekend, President Joe Biden is expected to sign a bill raising the federal debt limit for approximately two years. It passed the House 314-117, with 149 of the yes votes coming from Republicans and 165 from Democrats. The bill passed the Senate 63-36. Forty-four Democratic senators voted for it, along with 17 Republicans and two independents.

The New York Times concludes that, compared with previous Congressional Budget Office forecasts, it will cut federal spending by $55 billion in 2024 and $81 billion in 2025. Moody’s Analytics estimates that, thanks to the bill, there will be 120,000 fewer jobs at the end of 2024 than there would be without it. According to the CBO, cuts to Internal Revenue Service enforcement will lead to tax revenues falling to the degree that it will actually increase the deficit on net, thereby accomplishing the exact opposite of the bill’s purported aim.

All this — plus the fact that the Biden administration is rewarding the GOP for taking the world economy hostage, thereby guaranteeing Republicans will do it again as soon as possible — is the bad news. The good news here is that it’s bipartisan!

Why didn’t the Democrats raise the debt limit without spending cuts during the lame duck period after the 2022 midterms, when they still controlled the House and Senate? They may not have had the votes, but we’ll never know because they didn’t even attempt it. As Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer explained at the time, “The best way to get it done — the way it’s been done the last two or three times — is bipartisan.”

Then, when the debt limit bill passed the House with the cuts, a White House statement celebrated that the vote was “bipartisan” in the headline and then mentioned it two more times in three paragraphs of text.

President Biden: "My fellow Americans, when I ran for president I was told the days of bipartisanship were over. That Democrats and Republicans could no longer work together, but I refused to believe that, because American can never give into that was of thinking." pic.twitter.com/IWPbbkGHCc
— CSPAN (@cspan) June 2, 2023

This posturing makes sense, since Americans constantly say we love the concept of bipartisanship. A 2021 CNN poll found that 87 percent of us feel attempts at bipartisanship in Congress are a good thing. This includes 92 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of Republicans, thereby making this sentiment about bipartisanship itself bipartisan.

So now’s a good time to look back at some of the other great bipartisan achievements of the past few decades. An optimist will see these as all-too-rare occasions when Democrats and Republicans put their differences aside, reached across the aisle, and worked together to get things done. A realist may suspect these are examples of both Democrats and Republicans wanting to screw regular people in service of their donors, and only having the courage to do it because the other side was willing to hold their hand and jump with them — so neither party could be blamed.

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000

In the last days of the Clinton administration, the House passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act 292-60. One hundred and fifty-seven Democrats voted for it, together with 133 Republicans. The Senate passed it under unanimous consent.

By exempting many financial instruments from regulation, this extremely bipartisan bill helped lay the groundwork for the 2008 financial meltdown and the subsequent near-depression. In 2013, Bill Clinton privately spoke about his desperate attempts to stop the act from passing. This was all lies: His administration had enthusiastically lobbied for it.

2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force

Public Law 107-40, signed on September 18, 2001, by President George W. Bush, is certainly the most bipartisan act of the 21st century. The bill gave Bush the authorization “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” Every Democrat and Republican voting said yes to it with the solitary exception of Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California.

The executive branch predictably seized this power to go hog wild. The 2001 AUMF has been used as justification by Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump for military action in 12 countries including Afghanistan, plus drone strikes and regular bombing in seven.

About 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001. All in all, the war on terror is estimated to have caused 4.5 million deaths, a ratio of 1,500 to 1.

Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002

Two hundred and fifteen Republicans and 81 Democrats voted in October 2002 to give Bush the power to invade Iraq. In the Senate, 48 Republicans and 29 Democrats voted yes.

Bush fired Larry Lindsey, the director of his National Economic Council, for saying the U.S. might have to spend as much as much as $200 billion on the war. It will eventually cost America at least $2.4 trillion.

American Jobs Creation Act of 2004

In October 2004, Congress passed a bill including a corporate tax holiday — i.e., an opportunity for multinational U.S. companies that had been holding cash overseas (so it couldn’t be taxed) to bring that cash back to America at an ultra-low tax rate. It was totally bipartisan, with 207 Republicans and 73 Democrats voting for it in the House, plus 44 Republicans and 25 Democrats voting yes in the Senate.

The rationale for the bill, as is clear from its name, was that this was going to create tons of great American jobs. In reality, lots of the money (from this and other Bush tax cuts) went to bigger paychecks for corporate executives. Meanwhile, the prime beneficiaries of the bill actually cut their U.S. payroll. Bill Clinton later said that Bush “got so mad that he signed the five and three-quarter percent repatriation bill and, he said, none of it was reinvested.”

Budget Control Act of 2011

The GOP previously used the debt limit to take the economy hostage in 2011, after taking back control of Congress during the 2010 midterms during Obama’s first administration. The crisis was resolved by the passage of the Budget Control Act, with 174 Republicans and 95 Democrats voting for it in the House. In the Senate, more Democrats (47) voted yes than Republicans (27).

With the economy still reeling from the quasi-depression of 2007 to 2009, the $1 trillion-plus in cuts to discretionary spending mandated by the Budget Control Act kept the economy weak and millions of Americans desperate for years to come. The Budget Control Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act each deserve a kind of half-sack for the presidency of Donald Trump.

So there you have it: five triumphs of bipartisanship. Depending on how you calculate it, together these alone have cost the U.S. perhaps $15 trillion, in addition to causing an incalculable amount of human suffering, here and overseas. The debt limit bill can’t hope to be in this league, of course. But there’s always more bipartisanship to come tomorrow.

The post The Debt Limit Bill: Yet Another Triumph for Bipartisanship appeared first on The Intercept.

Henry Kissinger, History’s Bloodiest Social Climber

Jon Schwarz — Sat, 27 May 2023 12:24:28 +0000

Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., on Feb. 6, 2023.

Photo: David Crane/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images

In 2002, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his wife attended an elegant dinner party hosted by Barbara Walters. Other participants included Time editor Henry Grunwald, one-time ABC Chair Thomas Murphy, and Peter Jennings, then the anchor of ABC “World News Tonight.”

At one point in the evening, as New York magazine recounted, Jennings addressed Kissinger and asked him, “How does it feel to be a war criminal, Henry?”

Kissinger did not respond. However, Grunwald informed Jennings that this inquiry was “unsuitable.” Walters, who considered Kissinger “the most loyal friend,” later said, “I tried to change the subject, but it was a very uncomfortable moment. [Kissinger’s wife] Nancy reacted very strongly and hurt.”

There are several notable things about this.

First, the people at the top of American society absolutely love Henry Kissinger. He is their beloved compatriot, and they are anxious to protect his delicate feelings.

Second, Jennings sincerely believed that Kissinger was a war criminal and, unusually, was willing to say this in private. Yet he didn’t have the courage to say this in public, to his audience of tens of millions of Americans. Presumably he then would no longer be invited to these sorts of parties.

Third, Kissinger’s fancy, famous, rich pals will not exactly dispute that Kissinger is a monster. Rather, bringing it up is an embarrassing social faux pas, like, say, mentioning how everyone knows that your buddy is cheating on his wife, who is sitting next to you. Why would you want to spoil the mood just when we’re all feeling toasty from the Chambertin Grand Cru and having such a lovely time?

Think of how Kissinger lives, ensconced in the silken embrace of wealth and power, when you read Nick Turse’s new reporting on his actions while in office. Kissinger, it turns out, was responsible for even more misery and death in the U.S. bombing of Cambodia than was already known — which is truly saying something.

At the top of the pyramid, Kissinger enjoys endless banquets and oceans of acclamation. During the Nixon administration, Kissinger was beloved by Hollywood, often literally. He spoke at the 1996 funeral for a less prominent war criminal, Thomas Enders, an event also attended by David Rockefeller (John D.’s grandson, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank), Paul Volcker (chair of the Federal Reserve who said, “The standard of living of the average American has to decline”), Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat (an Argentinian billionaire), and Gustavo Cisneros (a Venezuelan billionaire).

At the height of the Iraq War, Vice President Dick Cheney reported that “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by.” Hillary Clinton referred to Kissinger as “a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state.” (Clinton rearranged her schedule giving an award to designer Oscar de la Renta so both she and de la Renta could attended Kissinger’s 90th birthday.) In 2014, he attended a Yankees game with noted humanitarian Samantha Power, who later received an award both named after and presented to her by Kissinger.

He served on the board of the fraudulent company Theranos with Jim Mattis, the Marine Corps general who’d go on to be Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, and George Shultz, who was secretary of state for Ronald Reagan. Kissinger joked that he didn’t ask questions of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, because “We were all afraid of her.”

This week, the Washington Post granted Kissinger’s son David — president of Conan O’Brien’s production company — space to tell us that to enjoy his 100th birthday, Kissinger is participating in “centennial celebrations that will take him from New York to London and finally to his hometown of Fürth, Germany.” One of the kickoff events was held at the Yale Club in Manhattan:

The tables are set for a celebration of Henry Kissinger at 100, hosted by @EconClubNY at the Yale Club.

What would you ask Dr. Kissinger? pic.twitter.com/EtwfSS4Sx4
— Jonathan Guyer (@mideastXmidwest) May 23, 2023

Then consider those down at the bottom of the pyramid: the Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians, Timorese, Pakistanis, Latin Americans, and many more, whose lives and bodies were torn to shreds by Kissinger. (The “many more” here includes U.S. soldiers, whom Kissinger referred to as “dumb, stupid animals to be used.”) Here is what Turse writes about one such person he met while reporting in Cambodia:

Round-faced and just over 5 feet tall in plastic sandals, Meas Lorn lost an older brother to a helicopter gunship attack and an uncle and cousins to artillery fire. For decades, one question haunted her: “I still wonder why those aircraft always attacked in this area. Why did they drop bombs here?”

But Meas Lorn will never, ever get an answer. Turse describes an encounter with Kissinger when he was able to pass her inquiry along:

When pressed about the substance of the question — that Cambodians were bombed and killed — Kissinger became visibly angry. “What are you trying to prove?” he growled and then, when I refused to give up, he cut me off: “Play with it,” he told me. “Have a good time.”

I asked him to answer Meas Lorn’s question: “Why did they drop bombs here?” He refused.

“I’m not smart enough for you,” Kissinger said sarcastically, as he stomped his cane. “I lack your intelligence and moral quality.” He stalked off.

“Play with it.” It is bracing indeed to understand that the people who run this country find this kind of human being charming and delightful. It makes you wonder if there are any killers from history who they would not celebrate, assuming the killers had conducted their slaughter with the aim of keeping America’s elites rich, warm, and safe behind a phalanx of guns.

The post Henry Kissinger, History’s Bloodiest Social Climber appeared first on The Intercept.

The Press is Falling for Anti-Abortion “Fetal Heartbeat” Propaganda

Judith Levine — Sat, 27 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

A woman rests next to anti-abortion posters in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on June 24, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

Getty Images

“Once a fetal heartbeat could be detected, typically around the sixth week of pregnancy … ”

When I read this phrase in the New Yorker, referring to Texas’s first abortion ban, I shot off a letter to the editor. “This is misleading,” I wrote. “There is no heartbeat at six weeks because the fetus does not yet have a heart. As San Francisco OB-GYN Dr. Jennifer Kerns told NPR: ‘What we’re really detecting is a grouping of cells that are initiating some electrical activity. In no way is this detecting a functional cardiovascular system or a functional heart.’” I noted that “a six-week fetus is about the size and shape of a baked bean.”

If the vaunted New Yorker copy desk could let this bit of anti-abortion bunk stand without comment, what was going on? I combed the media. Not just the National Review—which calls corrections like Dr. Kerns’s “mendacity”— or the Catholic press but also mainstream local and national news outlets including CNN, The Associated Press, Reuters, U.S. News & World Report, and PBS were parroting the same descriptor of the inaccurately — and of course strategically — named “fetal heartbeat” laws being debated or enacted in states from Idaho to Iowa, Georgia to New Hampshire.

The chorus resounded from websites, television, and radio from coast to coast: South Carolina was debating a law that “bans most abortions after early cardiac activity can be detected in a fetus or embryo, which can commonly be detected as early as six weeks into pregnancy”; in Georgia, a “law banning abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detected, typically around six weeks”; Nebraska’s legislature made an “unconventional move … after conservatives failed to advance a bill that would have banned abortion once cardiac activity can be detected — generally around six weeks of pregnancy.”

A number of the reports got it half right, adding that when the so-called heartbeat is first detected, many women do not even know they are pregnant.

Maybe it’s correction fatigue, brought on by Donald Trump’s 35,500-plus lies and the subsequent atrophy of truth in politics and media. In any case, there are signs of increasing credulity — or laziness. In May 2021, the AP published an in-depth piece headlined “‘Fetal heartbeat’ in abortion laws taps emotion, not science,” by staff reporters Julie Carr Smyth and Kimberlee Kruesi. A year later — the week the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson came down, upholding Mississippi’s 15-week ban and nullifying the constitutional right to abortion — Smyth was tasked with penning a Q&A explainer of current heartbeat laws.

Like the previous article, this one put “fetal heartbeat” between quotes every time. Unlike the first, however, the explainer toggled between truth and fiction. In the second paragraph, Smyth hit the “fetal heartbeat” shortcut key: “Such laws, often referred to as ‘fetal heartbeat bills,’ ban abortions once cardiac activity is detected, which can happen around six weeks into pregnancy.” This deception by omission — there is no cardiac activity without a heart — is repeated at paragraph 8. At paragraph 12 comes the caveat that the widely used legislative language of unborn humans and beating hearts “does not easily translate to medical science” — there’s a link to the previous year’s piece — “because at the point where advanced technology can detect that first visual flutter … the embryo isn’t yet a fetus, and it doesn’t have a heart.” Paragraphs 16 and 22 refer again to “cardiac activity.”

But the other side also fiddles with the facts, notes Smyth. Abortion rights proponents often call these laws six-week abortion bans. “That, too, is misleading,” she writes, because the texts “make no mention of a particular gestational age after which abortion is illegal.” Ecce balance.

Always better at propaganda than its opponents and, also unlike its opponents, instinctively sentimental, the anti-abortion movement was quick to appropriate the heart as both the metaphor of love and compassion and the critical sign of life itself.

Even before Roe, the opponents of abortion had conflated science and religious morality through language, transforming a blob of disorganized embryonic cells into an “unborn child.” “To take the life of an unborn child, regardless of the number of days it has been forming, is murder,” read a 1967 pamphlet called “Abortion: Yes or No?” But it was in 1983, a decade after Roe, with virtually no anti-abortion victories to show — 88 of 96 abortion bills introduced in state legislatures and Congress were defeated, and public opinion stuck heavily in support of abortion rights — that a fortunate stroke of political instinct matured into strategy.

The anti-abortion movement was quick to appropriate the heart as both the metaphor of love and compassion and the critical sign of life itself.

That year, a banner headline in the National Right to Life News proclaimed: “Science: The Pro-Life Movement’s Emerging Ally.” The next year came “The Silent Scream,” a 28-minute film that the Right to Life Committee called the “‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of the pro-life movement,” and rightfully so: It is probably the most influential piece of propaganda in the history of the abortion debates. Narrated by the late abortion doctor turned anti-abortion spokesperson Bernard Nathanson, the film presents the sonographic record of a 12-week vacuum aspiration abortion as visible testimony to the alleged pain and distress of the “little person” at the moment of its destruction.

New technologies “have convinced us that beyond question, the unborn child is simply … another member of the human community,” intones Nathanson, “indistinguishable in every way from any of us.” Deftly moving between technical explanations of sonography and embryology, and emotionally charged descriptions of abortion and the alleged suffering of the preborn “child,” “The Silent Scream” epitomizes the movement’s dominant rhetorical strategy going forward: serving up scientific bullshit generously sweetened with sap.

In 1992, the strategy was refined: The heart became the synecdoche for the body and soul of the unborn. Right to Life launched a media campaign with the tagline “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart.” The accompanying graphic, reproduced on flyers and political buttons, was an EKG zigzag flatlining across a red valentine-shaped heart.

Then in 2011, veteran antiabortion and anti-LGBTQ+ activist Janet Folger Porter transformed rhetoric into legislation. The former legislative director of Ohio Right to Life and founder of Faith2Action (“formed to WIN the cultural war for life, liberty, and the family”) conceived and lobbied indefatigably for the first state “fetal heartbeat” law, which Ohio enacted in 2012. Porter fueled the campaign with heart-shaped balloons, teddy bears, and red roses. Its slogan fused science and sentiment: “If a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected.”

The idea spread quickly. National Right to Life released a one-minute video. Its images are intrauterine closeups; its opening soundtrack is a rumble resembling the background noise of a Weather Channel hurricane report, with a woman’s voice above it: “You are listening to the sound of the heartbeat of a living unborn baby.” Within a decade, more than a dozen states had adopted the language of Folger’s bill almost identically.

There are exceptions to the press’s rote adoption of right-to-life language, New York Times’ coverage among them. For its part, the reproductive justice movement is finally upping its rhetorical game, renaming the heartbeat legislation “forced pregnancy” or “forced motherhood” laws. But the forced motherhood movement is constantly, often quietly, escalating the discursive battle. The “unborn baby” has now been promoted in legislative texts to the “unborn human individual.” If babies in utero are at least dependent on their mothers for protection and sustenance, a “human individual” can be construed as a person separate from and equally deserving of rights as its mother.

Anti-abortion propaganda is making its way into the legal record. It was a triumph for the antis when Justice Samuel Alito, in the Dobbs opinion, repeated soundly disproven claims as “legitimate interests” justifying the revocation of the constitutional right: that abortion is unhealthy and unsafe (presumably more so than pregnancy, which it isn’t); that it is a “particularly gruesome or barbaric medical procedure” (which it isn’t); and, the fantasy promulgated by “The Silent Scream,” that abortion causes fetuses pain.

In ruling for the plaintiffs and against the Food and Drug Administration in its approval of mifepristone, Texas federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk further enshrined antiabortion rhetoric in legal precedent by calling a pharmaceutically induced pregnancy termination a “chemical” abortion. The antis’ derogative sounds more painful and harmful, and creepier, than the mainstream usage, “medication” abortion.

Will the media fall in line? On the website of Wyoming Public Radio in March, a news item began this way: “Wyoming recently became the first state to explicitly ban the use of pills for abortion. The new law comes as chemical abortion is in the national spotlight due to a legal battle over a specific medication in Texas.” Throughout the text, “chemical abortion” is used interchangeably with “medication abortion,” without qualification or quotation marks.

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The Debt Limit Is Just One of America’s Six Worst Traditions

Jon Schwarz — Sat, 20 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

The dome of the U.S. Capitol is reflected, on Jan. 6, 2022 in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Image

Imagine that your family has a generations-long tradition that requires that for every 10th dinner, you search your neighbors’ trash cans like raccoons and eat whatever garbage you find.

Usually none of you asks why you do this. It’s just what you learned from your parents. But occasionally someone does some family research and finds out it originated in the early 1800s, when your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather explained in his diary that he was creating this custom “so every feventh child will expire from famonella.” And you have to admit this still works, since every now and then one of your children dies from food-borne illness. Yet you keep on eating the garbage.

This is what American politics is like, except we have dozens of these aged traditions whose purpose is actively malevolent or simply serves no purpose at all. They nonetheless cling like barnacles to our life in the 21st century. We just can’t get our act together to get rid of them.

The debt ceiling plaguing Washington politics — and, potentially, poisoning the rest of us — is just one of at least six of these abominable ideas.

The Debt Limit

Believe it or not, the debt ceiling is an improvement on what the United States used to do. Congress once required the executive branch to get its permission to do any borrowing whatsoever and in fact, often specified all the details — i.e., how long the bonds would take to mature, what interest rate it would pay, etc.

This was a terrible way to run a country and to its credit Congress over the decades after World War I changed this awful system into another, slightly less awful one. Now Congress just limits the total borrowing by the government and lets the Treasury Department take care of the details.

But it still makes no sense. Congress has already ordered the executive branch to spend money on certain activities and also levy certain taxes. It’s contradictory and silly for Congress to also say that the government can only borrow a certain amount of money to make up whatever difference between the spending and taxes it itself has required.

It’s also dangerous. No one knows exactly what will happen if the debt limit is breached, and the Biden administration then fails to use the various options it has to keep paying the bills. But it definitely would be extremely unpleasant.

In the past, this danger has never manifested in reality, for good reason. A debt limit imbroglio would immediately cause the most pain to the financial and corporate interests traditionally represented by the Republican Party. As some people have observed, the GOP’s refusal to raise the debt limit unconditionally is like a crazed man pointing a gun at his head and saying, “Give me what I want, or I’ll shoot!”

But there are two problems with this metaphor. First, a strong faction of the Republican Party appears to have convinced itself that shooting itself in the head wouldn’t hurt that much. Second, the rest of the country is the GOP’s metaphorical conjoined twin. If that faction decides to commit suicide, it’s going to cause severe problems for us too.

Pretty much the only other country that has created this pointless problem for itself is Denmark. I lived there briefly when I was 6 years old, and while they broadcast American shows on TV, they didn’t have ads to accompany them and just filled up the extra time with footage of goldfish swimming around in a bowl. Keeping the debt limit will inevitably lead us down the path to this kind of horrifying socialism.

The Electoral College

The U.S. right constantly proclaims that the Electoral College is a sign of the enduring wisdom of our founders, who created it to give smaller rural states a voice in the choice of the president.

This means that they must also believe the Founding Fathers were dolts with absolutely no idea what they were doing. Of the first five presidents, four of them were from Virginia, and all four served two terms. Meanwhile, the only exception, John Adams from Massachusetts, was in office for just four years. This means that during the first 36 years of presidents, the chief executive was a Virginian for 32 of them. And during this period, Virginia was either America’s biggest or second-biggest state.

However, America’s founders were not in fact incredibly incompetent. The actual rationale for the Electoral College was explained by James Madison in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention. Madison said he believed the best way to choose a president would be by popular vote, which “would be as likely as any that could be devised to produce an Executive Magistrate of distinguished Character.”

But “there was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people.” This was, Madison said, the fact that Southern states generally had stricter limits on which men could vote, and more of their population was enslaved. This meant that the South “could have no influence in [a popular] election” and so would never support a Constitution that used this method. Hence the Electoral College kludge was necessary to get the U.S. off the ground.

The Senate

Madison, however, was by no means all-in on democracy. As he also said at the Constitutional Convention, he believed that for the new country to endure, part of the government had to represent the “invaluable interests” of large, rich landowners and make sure the rabble couldn’t vote to take their wealth away. Part of the structure they were creating in Philadelphia, Madison believed, “ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body.”

The Constitution originally ordained that senators would be elected by state legislatures. This was altered by the 17th Amendment, and senators have been popularly elected since 1913. Nonetheless, Madison’s scheme continues to work surprisingly well, with the Senate still being the place where the political hopes of Americans go to die.

One solution here would be for the California legislature to wait until Democrats control the federal House and Senate. Then California could separate itself into 68 heavily gerrymandered blue states with Wyoming-sized populations. Congress could admit all the new states and their 136 Democratic senators into the union — and then easily block any red states from trying something similar. This would be totally constitutional and be worth it just to get the U.S. right to stop talking about the wisdom of the founders.

The Filibuster

The Senate is inherently against popular democracy. But those running it have long believed that it isn’t anti-democracy enough and so have supported the supermajority requirements of the filibuster. Between 1917 and 1994, 30 bills were stopped from passage thanks to the filibuster. Half of these were civil rights measures, including anti-lynching measures, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and attempts to outlaw poll taxes. This is why in 2020, Barack Obama called the filibuster a “Jim Crow relic.” But neither he nor any prominent Democrats has put much energy into getting rid of it.

“First Past the Post” Voting

The way voting generally works in the U.S. is that whoever gets the most votes wins. This is simple, easy to understand, and bad. It naturally creates a two-party duopoly, since each party can accurately harangue any miscreants within its ranks tempted to vote for a third party that they will simply act as spoilers — i.e., if they vote for their first-choice candidate, they’re merely making it more likely that their last-choice candidate will win.

There are several excellent solutions to this problem, including instant-runoff voting and — for House elections on a state and federal level — multimember districts. The problem here is that both the Democratic and Republican parties love the current setup and are not interested in creating more competition for themselves just because it would be good for America.

Most political commentators don’t have the courage to tell you this, but I do: All of our current suffering is the fault of the Florida Panhandle.

The Florida Panhandle

Geographically and culturally, the Florida Panhandle makes no sense. On any sensible map, it would belong to Alabama. But it’s part of Florida thanks to ancient colonial struggles between the United Kingdom, Spain, and France — struggles that happened before there even was a United States.

If Florida didn’t have its conservative panhandle, Al Gore would have easily beaten George W. Bush in Florida in the 2000 election and become president. The Bush administration resolutely ignored all the warnings from its intelligence agencies about the coming 9/11 attacks, but Gore almost certainly would have taken the threat seriously enough to disrupt the terrorist plot. No 9/11, no Iraq War. And no Bush presidency, no majority on the Supreme Court for Citizens United and the ensuing catastrophic surge of cash into the U.S. political system. Moreover, the 2007-2008 economic disaster would probably not have occurred or would have been significantly less severe.

Instead the Florida Panhandle gave us our current country, which is constantly going haywire. It also gave us Errol Morris’s documentary “Vernon, Florida,” originally titled “Nub City,” about a small town where many residents have amputated their own limbs in order to collect dismemberment insurance.

So that’s thaT: six ghastly political ideas that do nothing but torment us. We’re currently experiencing this with the debt ceiling and may soon feel it to a far greater degree. Yet we don’t have it in us to get rid of any of them. It’s enough to make you think the most powerful force in human society isn’t the normal candidates like money or sex, but inertia.

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The Yemen War Can Be Over — If Biden Wants It

Ryan Grim — Thu, 18 May 2023 21:26:22 +0000

Yemeni tribal figures from Abyan province wait to get their military commander freed from prison in Sanaa, Yemen, on April 30, 2023.

Photo: Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images

I’ve always thought of the famous John Lennon refrain, “War is over, if you want it,” as mostly a thought experiment meant to shake us out of the learned helplessness that can lead to forever wars. But in the case of the war in Yemen, the war really is over if we want.

Everybody else directly or indirectly involved — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Houthis, China, Oman, Qatar, Jordan, etc. — appears to want to put the war behind them. A ceasefire has held for more than a year, and peace talks are advancing with real momentum, including prisoner exchanges and other positive expressions of diplomacy. Yet the U.S. appears very much not to want the war to end; our proxies have been thumped on the battlefield and are in a poor negotiating position as a result.

Reading between the lines, the U.S. seems to be attempting to slow-walk and blow up the peace talks. Triggering a resumption of hostilities would unleash yet another Saudi-led bombing campaign that could win U.S. proxies better terms when it comes to control of the strategically positioned Yemeni coastline. (The Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden link the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean at the southwestern corner of Yemen, an area so geopolitically important to the flow of oil and international traffic that the U.S. has one of its largest bases, in Djibouti, across the strait.)

Tim Lenderking, the U.S. special envoy for Yemen, has been offering up particularly pessimistic comments on negotiations. “I don’t expect a durable resolution — and we should not — to the nearly eight-year conflict in Yemen to happen overnight,” he said recently in the region. “A political process will take time and likely face numerous setbacks, but I continue to be optimistic that we have a real opportunity ahead of us for peace.” That sounds nice, but decoding the diplomacy, the most important remark there is the prediction of “numerous setbacks” and the confidence that we “should not” expect “a durable resolution.”

“I don’t think we’re near the finish line yet,” Lenderking went on. “I think there is great challenges ahead. I think there is still a considerable amount of distrust among the parties, and there’s considerable division within Yemen’s society itself.”

In fact, Lenderking is attempting to wish “considerable division” back into Yemeni society. Much of that considerable division has been resolved by the Houthis winning the war. But acknowledging that would give the U.S. and Saudi-backed proxies, which operated largely out of luxury hotel rooms in Riyadh, no real position in the new Yemeni government. That’s why the U.S. keeps pressing for an “inclusive government” — the same phrase the U.S. has used with Afghanistan, demanding that in order for us to release the country’s foreign currency reserves, the Taliban must empower our proxies there (the warlords the Taliban already paid off to hand the country over to them).

In mid-April, as news of the Saudi-Iran-Houthi peace deal emerged, U.S. diplomats rushed to Saudi Arabia to tap the brakes. Axios reported at the time that the Brett McGurk, a top envoy to the region, and Lenderking “underscored the U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s defense against threats from Yemen or elsewhere and emphasized the need for forging broader regional integration and stability through a combination of diplomacy, deterrence, and new investment and infrastructure.” This saber rattling and talk of new security guarantees came just as hundreds of prisoners were being exchanged, and the world was celebrating the steps toward peace.

A State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, said that I was reading too much into the U.S. insistence on transitioning the talks over to the United Nations and making sure the deal is “comprehensive” and inclusive” before peace is reached. “I reject your premise that we’re hostile to these peace talks,” Patel said. “In fact, Tim reiterated our commitment to not just strengthening the UN brokered truce but also how we remain focused on helping the parties secure a new, more comprehensive agreement.”

The U.S. knows that time is not on the Houthis’ side.

But the U.S. knows that time is not on the Houthis’ side. Saudi Arabia is still inflicting a blockade on Yemen, preventing food, medical supplies, and energy from entering the country at anywhere near the capacity needed for basic survival. In Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, a charitable offering worth roughly $9 recently drew a crowd of hundreds to a local school. Houthi security forces, in a failed effort at crowd control, fired weapons in the air; a bullet reportedly hit an electrical box, sparking an explosion and a panicked stampede that left at least 78 people dead.

The Houthis, for their own political and literal survival, need the blockade lifted. If the talks drag on for too long, the Houthis are likely to resume cross-border strikes. Everybody on all sides knows that, which is why the Saudis appear eager to get to a final deal, while the U.S. keeps throwing up new conditions.

Hassan El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East policy for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, who has lobbied for an end to the war, said the U.S. rhetoric makes him nervous. “I’m very concerned that the administration is adding all these conditions to a full U.S. military exit and a Saudi-Houthi deal. I’m worried that they’d use the idea that we need to have a perfect inclusive peace as a precondition to lifting the blockade,” he said, adding that he is completely supportive of an inclusive peace — but the U.S. has no business dictating terms of what peace should look like. “Yemenis should be allowed to chart their own future. It increasingly seems like the Biden administration would rather slow down diplomatic progress instead of finally just ending the Saudi-Houthi conflict.”

“Lenderking has made clear that his primary goal is not ending the war but advancing the U.S. and Israeli anti-Iran crusade in the region.”

Erik Sperling, executive director of Just Foreign Policy, was even more blunt. “It’s surreal to think that the Biden administration is more hawkish on Yemen than the brutal regime of Mohammed bin Salman, but that’s the current reality,” said Sperling. “Lenderking has made clear that his primary goal is not ending the war but advancing the U.S. and Israeli anti-Iran crusade in the region. He would prefer the Saudis continue their brutal war and blockade against Yemen, even if it means endangering Saudi security, to a deal that legitimizes Yemen’s de facto authorities. The blood of Yemenis will once again be on U.S. hands if he succeeds in his goal of scuttling the Saudi-Houthi deal and the war escalates.”

Even if the State Department earnestly believes longer talks will produce a more durable peace, the longer the talks are delayed while the blockade remains in effect, the more likely it becomes that hostilities resume. And likelier it is that Houthis launch attacks across the border at Saudi Arabia, that Saudi Arabia responds with a devastating round of bombing — and then the U.S. proxies get a bigger chunk of Yemen in peace talks when they start up again amid the rubble.

If the U.S. wanted to reduce the risk of restarting the war, it could urge Saudi Arabia to lift the blockade without conditions, or could announce that it will not support a new round of Saudi bombing. The U.S. has resisted doing either.

On Thursday, a group of more than three dozen House Democrats sent a letter to the State Department urging the U.S. to make both of those commitments, urging U.S. diplomats to “[c]learly and publicly state that the United States will not provide any further support in any form to any faction party to the conflict while diplomatic talks to end the war are ongoing and should they fail to reach a diplomatic settlement and return to armed hostilities” and “[c]learly and publicly state that the Saudi blockade of Yemen’s ports — a form of collective punishment against innocent Yemenis — must be lifted unconditionally, as global international humanitarian leaders have long sought.”

BREAKING: @RepRashida announces new letter with @RepRoKhanna & dozens more urging @POTUS @StateDept_NEA to cut all military support for Saudi war in Yemen, forcing Saudis to sign a peace deal and end their brutal war.

If they don't, she'll force a War Powers vote to end it. pic.twitter.com/vpe3VLdsne
— Just Foreign Policy (@justfp) May 18, 2023

If the U.S. did what the letter is suggesting, the war would be over. If we want it.

The post The Yemen War Can Be Over — If Biden Wants It appeared first on The Intercept.

Josh Hawley Won’t Let Go of His Manhood

Jon Schwarz — Sun, 14 May 2023 11:40:36 +0000

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, March 15, 2023.

Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Across the ages, right-wing politics has had an enduring fixation: manliness, whatever that means exactly.

You may remember that Hogan Gidley, the press secretary for former President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, declared that Trump was “the most masculine person ever to hold the White House.”

Before that, there was Trump’s runner-up in manliness, George W. Bush. When Bush delivered his “Mission Accomplished” speech on an aircraft carrier, convicted Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy said Bush’s flight suit “made the best of his manly characteristic.” Bush’s one-time chief speechwriter Michael Gerson described him as possessing “a manly humor.”

Then there was the Vietnam War, a manly endeavor prosecuted by the Nixon administration’s manly men. When Henry Kissinger’s assistant Anthony Lake objected to the intense U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, Kissinger told Lake he was “not manly enough.”

Practitioners of this politics perceive themselves as exemplars of masculinity, even as they fear manliness in general is being sapped from society by the forces of darkness. For example, Kissinger once told Gerson that radical Islam was trying to humiliate us, “and we need to humiliate them.” Nixon referred to our Vietnamese enemies as “little cocksuckers.”

A few years before, in 1965, the U.S. had supported a massive bloodbath in Indonesia in which at least 500,000 people were slaughtered. The Indonesian military justified this by claiming that communist witches had castrated several army generals. This fear goes back as far as humans do: The 1486 exposé of witchcraft “Malleus Maleficarum” proved that witches can, via sorcery, “truly and actually remove men’s members.”

“Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” a new book by Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, is a worthy heir to this tradition.

Before you ask, the answer to your question is no. In a book titled “Manhood,” Hawley literally never mentions the most famous act of his life: running away from the protesters in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the protesters he had earlier that day saluted with a raised fist of solidarity.

The internet has set Hawley’s wee scamper of fear to many different tunes, each of which adds a different frisson of joy to the footage. There’s the theme from “Chariots of Fire,” the theme from Benny Hill, “Gonna Fly Now” from “Rocky,” “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees, and many, many more.

Josh Hawley running away to a variety of soundtracks.

Pt. 11: This one's for Finland. ?? pic.twitter.com/edOqe5l1Tc

— Mallory Nees (@The_Mal_Gallery) August 4, 2022

How can Hawley tell us, you might ask, that a man must be “willing to give his life for others, willing to act boldly, to face death,” yet not say anything about his well-known Sprint of Self-Preservation? How can he at the same time condemn “liberals” because they “flee from trial and pain”?

Your guess is as good as mine. My assumption is that it’s because the U.S. right has created an entire self-contained fantasy world, one in which GOP politicians like Hawley can thrive without ever facing the most obvious questions, so he doesn’t feel the need to bother. Notably, “Manhood” is published by the conservative Regnery, where editors presumably understand Hawley’s readers won’t want any intrusions from unpleasant reality.

A photograph of Sen. Josh Hawley from January 6 is seen on screen hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol in the Cannon House Office Building on July 21, 2022 in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

“Manhood” is somehow both short and long: Short because it’s an op-ed stretched out to barely 200 pages, and long because it is preternaturally boring. There are zero jokes, not even a single wry remark. Consuming it is like eating a small but dense log of suet.

Hawley’s thesis is that America’s men are in crisis: fathering children out of wedlock, failing to get jobs, committing crime, and playing video games. Why? The problem is the Greek philosopher Epicurus and his modern descendants, liberals.

Epicurus taught us, Hawley summarizes, that “the universe is neither planned nor orderly. … Mankind should put the gods aside and focus on what really matters, which is, he said, pleasure, happiness. … The trick was to arrange one’s life, and society in such a way to allow maximum choice for pursuing pleasure.” (This is actually not at all what Epicurus said; he wrote that “pleasure is the end” but emphasized the pleasure of “living prudently and honorably and justly.” But who cares, I guess.)

However, there is another philosophy of life, as found in the Bible: “It says man was created as God’s image and called to perform God’s work.” In Genesis, the Garden of Eden “is the only place of order and flourishing. … When we learn anything of the land beyond Eden’s borders, it appears untamed, wild. Dark forces lurk there.” The job of men is not to give into their hedonistic yearnings but assume the yoke of manhood and “subdue what is yet wild.”

The problem is that “there are dark forces that resist this mighty work,” i.e., the Epicurean liberals. Because the Epicureans believe only in base sensuality and giving no thought for the morrow, they are naturally hostile to God and the role he has given man and therefore proclaim that manhood is a wholly negative force that must be destroyed.

Hawley turns this idea into a book by repeating it at you 700 times. In addition, there are a smattering of statistics and a few charming anecdotes about Hawley’s sons Elijah and Blaise. But that’s pretty much it. “Manhood” is striking because it is fundamentally a work of airless theology. It’s just a dreary debate between Hawley’s interpretation of the Bible and his straw man Epicureans, all with the intellectual rigor of what he tells us in the last chapter: “The Bible is right. The Epicurean liberals are wrong.” Case closed.

Even Hawley’s conception of manhood is a shallow mess. The liberal Epicureans, he informs us, want to abolish masculinity altogether. But this would be a horrible mistake. To illustrate this, he relates a tale from his wife’s family, who had a homestead in New Mexico in the 1860s. It was occasionally menaced by “the region’s most notorious outlaw, Captain William Coe,” known for murder and pillage. On one occasion, Coe arrived while being chased by federal soldiers. Hawley’s wife’s widowed ancestor Susan fed Coe and then waited for him to fall asleep. She then sent her son Bud, then in his early teens, to search for the soldiers and bring them back to the homestead, even though she knew that if Coe woke while Bud was gone that Coe might kill her.

Bud succeeded, and Coe was captured. For Hawley, this means various things, but it is foremost “the story of a young man becoming something every man is called to be — a warrior.”

Yet as Hawley tells it, the most courage was shown by Susan. She was the one directly at risk. Moreover, Coe himself was a warrior, a Civil War veteran who was a “charismatic leader, in a malevolent sort of way.” So que es mas macho here? When Hawley writes elsewhere that “men are part of God’s solution to danger in the world,” shouldn’t he emphasize that a great deal of this danger is also created by men?

Another example Hawley provides of manliness is his uncle Gene, who served with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam. “That’s part of what it meant to be a man — to go stand on the line, to go and defend,” says Hawley. “To confront evil and do something about it.” Hawley does not mention the Tiger Force unit of the 101st, which carried out a voluminous spree of rape and murder of Vietnamese civilians. Nor does he ask whether any masculinity was demonstrated by the men who refused to go 7,000 miles as agents of the most powerful empire that’s ever existed to dump napalm on a peasant society.

Hawley’s core unseriousness is especially pernicious because America should be considering the issues he raises — just not like this. Hawley tells us that “the corporations [want] a nation of androgynous consumers who don’t rock the boat and don’t question much but buy plenty of cheap paraphernalia to keep the corporations profitable.” This is essentially accurate, but it’s also obviously the basic characteristic of our economic system, not the philosophy of elusive modern-day “Epicureans.” Ferocious 21st century capitalism and the society it’s created is clearly a bad fit for humans in general — and young men in particular. All you need to understand this is to witness how many of them are carrying out random massacres with AR-15s (something that goes unmentioned by Hawley).

The funniest part of all is that Hawley tells us that “America’s most urgent need politically is not for this or that piece of legislation. It is for men to embrace a call to character.”

So … WHY IS HE A SENATOR? By Hawley’s own estimation, he is the weakest, most unmanly man imaginable. His entire life is what he did on January 6: succumbing to his own desire for power, running away as fast as possible from the consequences, and refusing to acknowledge any of it.

The post Josh Hawley Won’t Let Go of His Manhood appeared first on The Intercept.

Tragedy in Texas as Pandemic Border Policy Ends — and a Rush to Judgment

Debbie Nathan — Fri, 12 May 2023 16:19:58 +0000

A man lights a candle at a memorial for eight migrants who were struck by a car and killed waiting at a bus stop on May 7, 2023, in Brownsville, Texas.

Photo: Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images

The man who crashed into a group of mostly Venezuelan migrants in Brownsville, Texas, on Sunday — killing eight of them — sounds in the media like a cipher, if not a monster. A video of the collision shows his vehicle knocking people down like matchsticks. A reporter I know told me that human gore and bone lay in the grass for hours afterward, putrefying in the heat and reeking. On Democracy Now!, a human rights activist called the killings a hate crime.

The driver was identified as George Alvarez. The police charged him with manslaughter, and they are investigating whether he committed hate crimes or acted intentionally. During a press conference, Brownsville Police Chief Felix Sauceda pointed to a list of Alvarez’s numerous criminal priors. One was “assaulting a public servant.”

Sauceda failed to clarify that it was Brownsville police who assaulted Alvarez years ago, not the other way around. For contesting that false claim in court, Alvarez was once considered a civil rights hero. (More about this later.) Meanwhile, the narrative around the killings has ignored details about history and current conditions in Brownsville — about animus against people like Alvarez that spans generations. That hostility may bode badly in the coming weeks and months, in Texas and throughout the country as we reach the end of Title 42.

Title 42 is an obscure regulation that allows the U.S. to turn back people at borders during public health emergencies. Former President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant Rasputin, Stephen Miller, revived it in 2020 during the Covid crisis, to keep people from applying for asylum. President Joe Biden has since used it to excuse his administration’s fear of aggressively crafting policy to help millions of asylum-seekers from South and Central America to move north to safety. On Thursday night, the rule expired. With its end and without robust federal assistance to help settle an anticipated wave of refugees, local communities are susceptible at worst to murderous hostility fueled by the right, and at best to pathological indifference.

The canary in the coal mine for these risks might be the chokehold. We’ve heard much about it lately in New York City, following the fatal strangulation of Black subway entertainer Jordan Neely, who had a history of mental illness, by white former Marine Daniel Penny, assisted by other riders. We’ve heard less about the chokehold’s use against people like Alvarez, in Texas.

Brownsville is an antique city. Downtown, it looks Caribbean the way New Orleans does, with French Quarter-style architecture dating from the 19th century. True to its appearance, the city’s history is Southern. It served as a cotton-smuggling port for the Confederacy during the Civil War, and a monument to Jefferson Davis stood in a park until 2020.

The city is 94 percent Latino, mostly Mexican American. Its poverty rate is over twice the national average. It is filled with Border Patrol and ICE agents, who take these jobs because they pay well over twice the local per capita income. In Brownsville, almost every Mexican American has a relative who is an immigration agent.

I lived there during the Trump administration. I reported on endemic dehumanization of poor people by law enforcement, and not just against immigrants. In the whirlpool of my nice gym in a nice part of town, I used to hear muscled men and well-coiffed women joke about this injustice, particularly when it came to migrants. A small crew of local rights activists resisted this generalized nastiness, but they barely made a dent.

I knew about the Ozanam Center, a nonprofit shelter for unhoused people and the site of Sunday’s tragedy. The eight migrants were staying there before they were killed. It’s been operating for decades. When I first moved to Brownsville to do reporting on immigration, an activist suggested that I go to Ozanam and offer some Hondurans $20 an hour plus lunch to help unload the moving van. I did so. After that, I heard nothing about the place. It was low key and out of the way.

Ozanam lies on the corner of Houston Road, which, along with nearby Travis and Crockett roads, are named after leaders of the 1835 Texas independence war with Mexico. Historians now concur that the rebellion was started by U.S. Southerners eager to import their Black chattel into Texas — where importation was illegal because Mexico owned Texas, and Mexico outlawed slavery.

Crossing Houston Road is Minnesota Avenue, not far from Iowa, Indiana, and North Dakota avenues. Midwestern whites migrated to Brownsville in the early 20th century and leveled the Latino ranching economy, replacing it with agribusiness fruit and vegetable farms. Along with their crops, they institutionalized the segregation of Mexican Americans, whom they derided as mixed-race “mongrels.”

Today, Alvarez lives in this neighborhood, where the houses near Ozanam are cramped and run-down. A friend who knows the area calls it “a very sad place.”

As a ninth-grade special-education student in 2005, Alvarez was arrested on suspicion of burglarizing a vehicle. He’d just turned 17 and, according to a later court filing, already was having problems with substance abuse. In his cell, he became frustrated about a broken phone and banged it. An officer who weighed 200 pounds threw 135-pound Alvarez to the ground and put him in a chokehold, with other officers assisting, the filing states. Alvarez was then charged with assaulting a public official, a major felony.

The incident had been captured on video, but the recording was never given to internal investigators. In a legal complaint he filed years later, Alvarez said he had feared that if he went to trial he would be convicted on the officer’s word and given a long sentence. Still a minor, he pleaded guilty and agreed to eight years of probation. Within months, he’d lapsed into drug addiction and violated probation. He was sent to state prison for eight years.

A few years later, according to court documents, another man, accused of the same crime by the same officer, found the recording of his own stay in detention, which proved the officer had lied and perpetrated the assault himself. Alerted that recordings existed, Alvarez demanded and received his and discovered the same lie. A judge ordered him freed after four years of hard time. He sued the city of Brownsville in federal court, a jury awarded him $2.3 million, and his case was listed in the University of Michigan’s National Registry of Exonerations.

But Brownsville appealed the decision, and the case went to the notoriously conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in New Orleans. Judges there overturned the jury’s verdict, reasoning that prosecutors do not have to reveal exculpatory evidence if a defendant pleads guilty. Alvarez’s lawyer went to the Supreme Court, which in 2019 declined to consider the case. Alvarez was denied a financial win that might have changed his life.

According to his lawyer, he now works at an industrial sandblasting company and has six children. But he is covered with tattoos that mark a brown man on the border as a lumpen, a pariah. He’s had additional arrests for driving while intoxicated and for assaulting other people, though most charges have been misdemeanors and most have been dismissed. He seems angry if not broken.

On Tuesday the Brownsville police said that toxicology tests were still being done on Alvarez, but early findings documented cocaine and marijuana in his system, as well as benzodiazepines — the ingredient in Valium, Xanax, Ativan, and Klonopin. These are highly addictive sedatives used to treat conditions including anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, and bipolar disorder. They alter reflexes and can make driving dangerous. High doses of cocaine can cause agitation, paranoia, aggression, and dizziness.

At about 8:29 on Sunday morning, Alvarez was driving a mile from his home. He ran a red light and barreled into the migrants. He himself was injured, and witnesses said he seemed disoriented. Some survivors kicked and beat him as he yelled anti-immigrant epithets. In subsequent interviews, some migrants cited these slurs as evidence that Alvarez committed a hate crime, and the press has pushed that narrative. Yet police have presented no evidence that Alvarez was motivated by hate, and none of his insults surpass the border shit talking I used to hear from the good citizens of Brownsville in the whirlpool.

Alvarez’s carnage may well turn out to have been an accident, and its location by a migrant shelter simply a horrible coincidence. Even so, publicity surrounding the crimes has suddenly turned Ozanam into a hate magnet. According to management, some people have blamed the organization’s sheltering of migrants for the killings. Earlier this week a young man tried to enter the parking lot while brandishing a handgun. Police charged him with reckless driving and drug possession.

Meanwhile, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott warns of a migrant “invasion” and is sending 450 National Guard members to the border. Biden is sending 1,500 troops, even as he announced this week that migrants will not be allowed to apply for asylum if they traversed another country first and did not apply there. Several border cities have issued disaster declarations.

In the north, New York City Mayor Eric Adams this week suspended “right to shelter” entitlement for asylum seekers. He has said New York City has no more resources for migrants. Until a few weeks ago, he’d averred that they were welcome. In the face of his new coolness, will ordinary New Yorkers cool too? Will they grow hateful?

Such questions bring us back to chokeholds. The mayor has lately scared straphangers about subway passengers with mental illness and argued that increased policing is necessary to control them. A civilian fatally choked Neely. But despite strong evidence that the killer acted as a vigilante, the district attorney’s office did not announce until 10 days later that he would be criminally charged — and only for manslaughter.

Across the country, anti-immigrant rhetoric is hardening into policy. Policy is churning out more rhetoric. Both are pushing people to the brink who are already addled and enraged. Under such pressure, will we be able distinguish anymore between hate crimes and accidents? Is there even a difference?

The post Tragedy in Texas as Pandemic Border Policy Ends — and a Rush to Judgment appeared first on The Intercept.

What the Debt Limit Fight Is Actually About

Jon Schwarz — Sat, 06 May 2023 09:00:54 +0000

A group of Senate Republicans hold a news conference to pass the House GOP legislation that would raise the debt limit and cut federal spending, outside the U.S. Capitol on May 3, 2023, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

It’s hard to believe I’m typing these words, but there’s a genuine chance Congress may fail to pass an increase in the debt limit. That would mean the U.S. might then in turn default on its debt sometime in June.

No one knows what would happen at that point, because it’s completely unprecedented. But it almost certainly would be deeply unpleasant, with huge job losses, unpredictable bits of the economy imploding, and knock-on effects in other countries that will make them both fear and hate us for decades. It would be the kind of massive self-inflicted wound that can be pulled off only by empires in their dotage.

Congress has veered close to this disaster in the past. But I’ve always believed that it would be impossible for it to actually happen, because the Republican Party’s funders on Wall Street and in corporate America understood how much damage it would do — not just to the country in general, which they don’t care about, but also to them specifically — and wouldn’t allow it.

I still believe that’s the most likely outcome, fingers crossed. However, the GOP donor class, never fans of reality to start with, has been drifting further and further into the fever swamps where the party’s politicians and base live. Many of the right’s ultra-wealthy used to understand the world well enough to act in their own best interest. Some still do. However, that minority now has far less power than billionaires who are as glued to Fox News as the party’s rank-and-file are. And these billionaires are suffering from the same cognitive impairment Fox causes all of its devotees.

And this brain-damaged community has a coherent worldview: that for the survival of America, they must destroy the “administrative state” — aka the New Deal, aka everything people like about the federal government, such as Social Security or regulations that stop chemical companies from dumping poison in your drinking water. Meanwhile, normal Americans have no idea the right has this planned, or even what those words mean.

Any non-hard-right reading of history suggests that the New Deal, and the basic infrastructure of U.S. politics it created, was a compromise that allowed human beings to live with capitalism. The only alternatives in the 1930s were (on the right) some form of fascism that would keep capitalism but eliminate democracy, or (on the left) dismantling capitalism and trying something wholly different.

The U.S. right has now come to the conclusion that this compromise was a disastrous mistake, one that they hope to start correcting by manufacturing this crisis. Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform and a key right-wing strategist said in 2001, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Right on time, they see a key opportunity to begin fulfilling Norquist’s dream.

This perspective not always enjoyed popularity within the Republican Party. Dwight Eisenhower famously wrote this to his older brother in 1954:

The Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. … Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. … Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

You can judge for yourself whether people like this are stupid, but it’s inarguable that their number is no longer negligible. Indeed, today Eisenhower would be considered a terrifying Woke Marxist by much of the Republican Party. Newsmax would run 37 segments exposing his damning admission to his brother that “the policies of this Administration have not been radically changed from those of the last.” In other words, he was starting from the same essential premises as New Deal Democrats.

That is no longer the case; GOP leaders do want radical change and believe they can get it. As former Vice President Mike Pence recently said, “I think the day could come where we can replace the New Deal with a Better Deal.” Strategists like Steve Bannon vow to conduct the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” The kinds of spending cuts demanded by the bill passed by the House would be a powerful first step to disemboweling the administrative state of taxes and regulation that have oppressed us for so long.

Reaching Bannon’s ultimate goal would mean a return to pre-New Deal politics, with Americans once again facing the kind of vicious predatory capitalism that can only exist when democracy is severely hobbled: It’s underappreciated that the glory days of this form of capitalism took place when most adults couldn’t vote. This is what Peter Thiel had in mind when he decried “the extension of the franchise to women” and explained that freedom for capital was incompatible with democracy.

The right’s thinkers have managed to convince its most prominent politicians that this is the way to go. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for instance, has constantly fulminated about the administrative state in his embryonic presidential campaign. They all either don’t understand the implications of what they’re pushing for, or do understand it but are sincere authoritarians. In any case, they feel they have no choice, since what Republicans like Eisenhower considered normal politics is in fact the road to some kind of apocalypse. If U.S. continues within the New Deal framework, they think, it will inevitably lead us to a totalitarian future, with starving Americans trapping rats to eat and all 5-year-olds being forced to undergo sex reassignment surgery. As Tucker Carlson recently told the Heritage Foundation, probably the most powerful think tank on the right, what they now face “is not a political movement. It’s evil.”

This sounds absolutely bonkers, and it is. But that doesn’t change the fact that a significant chunk of the U.S. right believes it. Some do understand that a U.S. default would cause a significant dose of pain. But they believe this is necessary to avoid the far greater pain currently headed our way, when Bill Gates will personally vaccinate everyone at gunpoint every three days. Indeed, in private moments they probably tear up at their own courage, perceiving themselves as true patriots willing to make this sacrifice for the greater good.

They also understand that any suffering by regular people would likely redound to their political benefit. After all, the Democratic Party has itself been trumpeting the awful consequences of the national debt for the past 30 years. Bill Clinton announced in his 1996 State of the Union address that “the era of big government is over.” In Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address, he told us “we have to confront the fact that our government spends more than it takes in. That is not sustainable.” Just last fall, the Biden White House proudly declared they’d achieved “the largest ever decline in the federal deficit.” All the Republicans want to do now is to negotiate to restore the kind of fiscal sanity that the Democrats have endorsed since the 1990s. How can Joe Biden refuse?

The Biden administration apparently did have a plan to deal with this situation. It was to close their eyes and hope it was still 2011. The Washington Post quotes a top Obama official from that time — during a previous debt limit standoff — as saying their playbook had been “really getting business leaders in key districts to lobby their congressman to tell them how important it was that the U.S. doesn’t default on its debts.” However, “This is not the Republican Party of George W. Bush or his father. Most of them do not care if Fortune 100 CEOs are freaking out.” Finding this out has apparently flummoxed the Biden team and left them with no other ideas except trying the same thing again.

It would be nice to believe Biden has a secret team ready to spring into action and execute one of the potential bold solutions if the debt limit isn’t increased in time. However, no journalists or pundits close to the White House have been able to locate much sign of this. The most that appears to be happening is fervent debate within the Biden administration over whether they could claim the 14th Amendment of the Constitution requires them to ignore the debt limit and continue borrowing money — i.e., a debate that, given the obvious trajectory of the GOP, they should have settled two seconds after Republicans took the House in the 2022 midterms. The possibility that the people at the summit of power have no credible plan to ward off onrushing catastrophe seems impossible, unless you are familiar with all of human history.

So get ready. One political faction has decamped to a fantasy world. Meanwhile, the other faction is living in another fantasy world in which the first faction hasn’t done this. Things here in the reality of our fading empire may be about to get pretty dicey.

The post What the Debt Limit Fight Is Actually About appeared first on The Intercept.

I Really Think You Should Read Tucker Carlson’s Last Speech Before Fox Fired Him

Jon Schwarz — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 10:00:22 +0000

Tucker Carlson gives a speech at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala in National Harbor, Md., on April 21, 2023.

Photo: Leigh Vogel/The New York Times/Redux

Soon the quadrillion online takes on Tucker Carlson’s firing by Fox News will be forgotten. Someday, Carlson himself will fade from human memory. Eventually people will think about cable news as much as they today ponder semaphore.

Yet I believe that one act of Carlson’s — his last pre-termination appearance, an April 21 speech at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala — will endure for millennia. It is a gargantuan achievement and will abide like a pyramid in the sand, an eternal monument to humanity’s infinite vanity, self-deception, and self-congratulation.

I’ve found it difficult to choose snippets of Carlson’s words to quote. It’s like trying to explain the perfection of Michelangelo’s David to someone, but being only able to show them its fingers, nipples, and wrinkly foreskin. You need the whole experience, to see how the parts fit together to express a larger truth, to genuinely understand its magnificence.

So if you possibly can, I urge you to read the entire transcript. Even better, watch the whole thing. Then we can reconvene below for an in-depth discussion.

As you see, Carlson’s speech is about the “two conclusions” to which he’s come during the past, dark decades.

The first is that he perceives a dangerous phenomenon in which Americans are “going along with a new, new thing, which is clearly a poisonous thing, a silly thing, saying things they don’t believe because they want to keep their jobs.” This is because “the herd instinct is maybe the strongest instinct … not to be cast out of the group, not to be shunned. … It’s harnessed, in fact, by bad people in moments like this to produce uniformity.” Huge swaths of Americans, then, have “become quislings, you see them revealed as cowards.”

Because of this, says Carlson, America’s institutions are “all run by weak people.” And “weak leaders cause an angry country.”

His second conclusion is better news: For every 10 cowards, there is one shining individual who has, in Carlson’s words, stood up to say, “No, I’m not doing that. … It’s a betrayal of what I think is true. It’s a betrayal of my conscience, of my faith, of my sense of myself, of my dignity as a human being, of my autonomy. I am not a slave. I am a free citizen, and I’m not doing that. And there’s nothing you can do to me to make me do it.”

Moreover, Carlson proclaims, “The truth is contagious. Lying is, but the truth is as well. And the second you decide to tell the truth about something, you are filled with this — I don’t want to get supernatural on you — but you are filled with this power from somewhere else.”

Here’s what you might assume Carlson would say next, if you’re the kind of dreamer who’s filled with an irrepressible hope that words can have meaning:

Carlson would have confessed that he himself is one of these shameful cowards. As everyone in the room surely knew, Carlson collected huge checks from Fox even as it encouraged its audience to believe what Carlson and everyone there knew was false: that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Carlson would have explained that he’d been a quisling to the truth and gone along with a new, new poisonous thing because he wanted to keep his job. He’d have apologized for being part of the herd trying to punish heretics, since he wanted Fox to fire a reporter who was reporting on the topic accurately.

In other words, he is one of the weak leaders creating an angry country. He knows these things because he was personally tested — and failed.

And that would have been merely the start of Carlson’s electrifying, manly truth-telling. He was speaking to all the potentates of the Heritage Foundation, one of the most powerful forces in U.S. politics supporting the capitalist depredations and hawkish foreign policy that we know Carlson hates with such passionate sincerity. Scarred by his moral collapse after the 2020 election, Carlson is now going to seize an incredible opportunity to be the 1 man in 10 with the courage to defy the herd to their faces!

He could have begun by paging through the Heritage Foundation’s 2022 annual report. He would have noted that Heritage’s top donors, giving over $1 million per year, include Barb Van Andel-Gaby: a member of the family that co-founded Amway, a multilevel marketing scheme and one of American business’s scuzziest bottom-feeders. Another is the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which Carlson would be horrified to note was a top contributor to the Project for a New American Century, the neoconservative outfit that helped make the invasion of Iraq happen.

He would be likewise appalled to see Heritage also got over $500,000 from Ray Stata, the co-founder of Analog Devices. Analog is a semiconductor company created with technology invented in the U.S. that is now — as it explains in an SEC filing — “leveraging an outsourcing model for manufacturing operations.” (It also owns factories in Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia, as well as the U.S.)

Then Carlson, in his role as a journalist committed to transparency, would excoriate Heritage for granting anonymity to 25 big contributors. He would be disgusted to see that Heritage tells donors “we pledge always to respect your philanthropic intent” and that it offers “a written contract clearly stating the purpose and intent of the donation and how it shall be spent.” Worst of all, the annual report proudly features a photograph of Donald Trump — a man Carlson believes to be a “demonic force” — at Heritage’s annual leadership conference.

Next, Carlson would have gotten down to specifics. He would have told his audience that Americans, wearied by the endless wars of U.S. elites, would be disgusted to learn of Heritage’s close ties with the world’s largest military contractor, Lockheed Martin. Carlson, a man devoted to peace, would have scoffed at Heritage’s eager promotion of a “new cold war” with China. Finally, he would angrily denounce Heritage’s declaration that any Biden administration proposals to weaken Covid-19 vaccine patents — and thereby lower the profits of Pfizer and Moderna — must be “dead on arrival.”

To say that Carlson did not utter anything like this is much like saying the sun is larger than a tangerine. It’s accurate — but doesn’t wholly capture the magnitude of the situation.

Carlson actually started with voluminous praise of Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage. He reports that he’d recently gone pheasant hunting with Roberts in South Dakota and found that, unlike all the phonies in D.C., Roberts is “completely real. He’s an honest person.” Carlson double-checked this by asking a member of Heritage’s security detail what he thought of Roberts. His response: “I would go to war for him.” As Carlson puts it, “Why would he lie to me?” Obviously, there’s no possible reason. As all students of human nature know, when the boss’s rich buddy asks an employee what they think of the boss, the employee always provides the absolute unvarnished truth.

Then Carlson gets into the details of the monstrous tyranny engulfing America, a tyranny that luckily enough has nothing at all to do with the Heritage Foundation. To start with, there’s “putting your pronouns in your email.” For what it’s worth, this does not fit with my personal experience. I’ve never put pronouns in my email beyond “I” or “you,” and I’ve yet to be sent to the Pronoun Detainment Camp high in the Sierra Nevadas.

Then there’s “saying things you can’t define. LBGTQIA+, who’s the plus?” This suggests that Carlson does not have access to a notable recent invention called the internet.

Also, “You have people who are saying, ‘I have an idea. Let’s castrate the next generation. Let’s sexually mutilate children.’” And, “The Treasury secretary stands up and says, ‘You know what you can do to help the economy? Get an abortion.’” Here Carlson is standing valiantly against many terrible things that have happened in his imagination.

Higher and higher Carlson’s fever rages. In the past, American politics was about “rational debates about the way to get to mutually agreed-upon outcomes. So, we all want the country to be more prosperous and free.” But now you have the good, rational people from Heritage in the room with him, versus something that’s “not a political movement. It’s evil.”

What is good? “Good is characterized by order, calmness, tranquility, peace … cleanliness. Cleanliness is next to godliness.” And what is evil? “Violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganization, and filth.” Yes, “and filth.” As Stanley Kubrick dramatized in “Dr. Strangelove,” and science has since illuminated, conservatives tend to have a peculiar fixation on contamination. Carlson is one second away from talking about our precious bodily fluids.

Indeed, he whips himself up into such a frenzy of fear that he pronounces himself ready to be martyred like St. Paul over these issues. “I hope it won’t come to that,” he says, “but if it does come to that, here I am. Here I am. It’s Paul on trial.”

This forms the bulk of Carlson’s Great Pyramid of human fatuousness. For 35 minutes he bloviates about the supreme importance of being “the lone, brave person in the crowd who says, ‘No, thank you.’” Then he says nothing that would cause his wealthy, cosseted crowd the least discomfort. It’s like watching someone yammer incessantly about how we all must wear double-breasted purple suits while standing before you in a bright green muumuu.

The greatest propaganda always identifies genuine, deep human problems, even as it embodies these problems itself.

This is, for me, why Carlson’s speech will last the ages. The greatest propaganda always identifies genuine, deep human problems, even as it embodies these problems itself. Carlson asks his audience to say a prayer for our country and mentions the Bible. But he’s apparently never read it. “Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” asks Jesus in Matthew 7:3. “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s.”

So all of that is wonderful enough. But then there’s the pyramid’s capstone, the pyramidion covered in gleaming hilarious gold.

“I’m paid to predict things,” Carlson tells us at one point. “I try and think a lot about what connects certain outcomes that I should have seen before they occurred.” Given what was just about to happen to Carlson less than three days later, this indicates either that Carlson was terrible at his job, or that he never understood what he was paid for to begin with.

The post I Really Think You Should Read Tucker Carlson’s Last Speech Before Fox Fired Him appeared first on The Intercept.

With Pentagon Leak, the Press Had Their Source and Ate Him Too

Nikita Mazurov — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 17:51:36 +0000

Members of law enforcement assemble near the home of Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira on April 13, 2023, in Dighton, Mass.

Photo: Steven Senne/AP

Tracing the concept of homo sacer from antiquity to modern life, philosopher Giorgio Agamben cites the ancient Roman lexicographer Festus, who defined the term as someone “whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide.” Homo sacer is thus an outlaw who is free to be pursued by vigilante lynch mobs but who, crucially, cannot be martyred. The mass media’s treatment of the alleged Pentagon leaker appears to have taken this conceit to heart, codifying him as a justifiable target for persecution, to be “tracked” and “hunt[ed] down.”

Over and over, the mainstream press has employed a rhetoric of exclusion, stripping the leaker bare of any protections that might be afforded to a whistleblower. He is not, they tell us ad nauseum, an Edward Snowden or a Chelsea Manning. “It does not seem to involve a principled whistleblower, calling attention to wrongdoing or a coverup,” according to a Washington Post editorial. The “far-right” is incorrectly calling him a whistleblower, claims the New York Times. This view lets the outlet chastise those who attribute different motives to the alleged leaker, Jack Teixeira, while simultaneously distancing itself from the “far-right,” despite its own notably pro-law enforcement slant.

The motives of Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, are important and newsworthy. They are also not fully known. Most press accounts have relied solely on interviews with minors who hung out in the same chatrooms as Teixeira. These sources have painted a compelling picture, but many others, including Teixeira himself, have not yet spoken publicly.

Why, just because the leaker didn’t bring his material directly to a news outlet, wasn’t he deserving of either protection or being cultivated as a future source?

Whatever his motives may have been, they don’t change the outcome of the leak: the release of informative documents that have underpinned major news stories in the same outlets that eagerly joined the search for their source. Reporters have argued that since Teixeira wasn’t a whistleblower, he was fair game to be hunted by law enforcement agencies and exposed by the press. This rationale conveniently sidesteps a key question: Why, just because the leaker didn’t bring his material directly to a news outlet, wasn’t he deserving of either protection or being cultivated as a future source? Why, instead, was he viewed solely or primarily as quarry?

The media’s claim that Teixeira is not a whistleblower has been based in part on the environment in which the documents were disclosed and the relatively small number of people with whom they were originally shared. Based on testimony from others in a chatroom, the Times wrote that the documents Teixeira allegedly shared, far from being disseminated in the public interest, “were never meant to leave their small corner of the internet.” Likewise, the Post claimed that “the classified documents were intended only to benefit his online family,” which Bellingcat estimated as having around 20 active users out of what the Times later said was about 50 total members. Yet on Friday, the Times reported that Teixeira had previously shared sensitive documents on another chat server that was publicly listed and had about 600 users. In their haste to reveal further possibly incriminating evidence against him, the authors seem not to have paused to reflect on how this wider distribution, if accurate, might undermine their earlier argument.

“Keeping secrets is essential to a functioning government,” the Post editorialized shortly after the documents began being covered in the mainstream press. “Breaking the laws for a psychic joyride is a despicable betrayal of trust and oaths.” Meanwhile, over on the news side, the paper churned out numerous articles revealing those very same secrets, some accompanied by unredacted copies of the leaked documents themselves.

Not to be outdone, the Times has deployed language that dehumanizes the leaker, evoking images of a threatening wild animal. The reporters don’t unpack the full significance of this hunting metaphor, which presumably ends with a slaughtered animal presented as a trophy. In the wake of the Times story naming the alleged leaker before his arrest (which has since been replaced by another story), Twitter was in full media victory lap mode, with reporters patting themselves on the back for their promptness in deanonymizing Teixeira.

More recently, however, the trophy hunters have begun to deny culpability for even the possibility that their investigations provided material assistance to the government.

Christiaan Triebert, a former Bellingcat staffer and a co-author of the Times investigation that initially named Teixeira, issued a disavowal of liability, explaining that the Times reporting team went to the suspect’s house in the hope of talking to him, but he wasn’t there, so instead, they interviewed his mother and, later, his stepfather. At one point, a man matching Teixeira’s description drove onto the property in a pickup truck, but upon seeing the journalists, he promptly departed.

Yet Triebert’s self-defense doesn’t entirely follow. “There seems to be a misconception that our story naming Teixeira led to his arrest,” Triebert tweeted. “That’s simply not the case.” But how does he know? Certainty about this only seems possible from inside the Department of Justice effort to find Teixeira, which isn’t where Triebert claims to stand. Triebert did not respond to a request for comment.

Aric Toler, a current Bellingcat staffer and the principle author of the Times investigation that first named Teixeira, has likewise been quick to dismiss the possibility that his reporting aided the government’s investigation: “This should have been obvious, but no, our story naming the Pentagon/Discord leaker didn’t help the feds find him. They already knew at least a day before we identified him.” He cites the FBI affidavit, employing zero skepticism about a government document that represents one side in what is about to become a contested legal process. Toler did not reply to multiple requests for comment.

The narrow parameters of these denials are telling. Toler has been careful to focus his disdain on the notion that the Times story naming the leaker helped lead to his arrest. But that was not the first time Toler wrote about the leaker. Four days earlier, on April 9, Toler published a story about the leak on Bellingcat’s site in which he named for the first time the Discord chat server where the documents seemed to have originally been leaked. In that piece, Toler also supplied the username of a member of the chat server where the documents were shared, explaining, “The Thug Shaker Central server was originally named after its original founder, one member of the server with the username ‘Vakhi’ told Bellingcat.”

These two pieces of information — the name of the server and the name of one of its users — could have led the FBI to issue a request to Discord to provide identifying information about the user as well as about the owner of the chat server.

The FBI’s affidavit states that on April 10, the day after Toler’s Bellingcat story was posted online, “the FBI interviewed a user of Social Media Platform 1 (‘User 1’).” That user, who is not named in the affidavit, told the FBI that “an individual using a particular username (the ‘Subject Username’) began posting what appeared to be classified information on Social Media Platform.” The “Subject Username,” the affidavit explains, refers to Teixeira.

As with all documentation produced by government investigators, the FBI affidavit must be taken with an iceberg-sized lump of salt. However, it is at least as possible that Toler’s Bellingcat story provided a material lead for the federal investigation as that investigators already knew about Vakhi and Thug Shaker Central before reading it.

Regardless of whether journalists actually provided material assistance to federal investigators, it is concerning that there has been so little public discussion of or reflection by the reporters involved on the ethical ramifications of their work.

After talking to people who knew Teixeira from the Discord server, the investigatory paths of the FBI and Toler diverged. The FBI appears to have identified the suspected leaker based on server records it requested from the platform, while Toler has revealed that he was able to identify the individual by leveraging information supplied by minors.

Though Toler stated that his sources were “all kids,” neither he nor the Times has made any mention of whether they obtained parental consent for these interviews. UNICEF guidelines state that consent from both the child and their guardian should be established prior to conducting an interview and that the intended use of the interview should be made apparent. It’s not clear whether Toler informed the minors that he was going to use clues they offered, like which video games the alleged leaker liked to play, to out Teixeira. The Times did not respond to a request for comment.

In a since-deleted tweet, Times military correspondent David Philipps effectively threatened that if you don’t leak to the Times, the paper will instead “work feverishly” to identify you. Nuanced or not, this tweet perfectly summarizes the media’s messaging regarding this case: Only those who reach out to a media outlet are worthy of protection; those who leak information via other means risk sharing the fate of homo sacer, a traitor to be hunted down.

The post With Pentagon Leak, the Press Had Their Source and Ate Him Too appeared first on The Intercept.

Politics, Not Science, Will Win the Battle for Mifepristone

Judith Levine — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 11:00:46 +0000

Activists holding abortion rights signs shout slogans during a rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 2023.

Photo: Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images

Since April 7, when Amarillo, Texas, federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk nullified the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, reproductive rights advocates have been decrying (among other things) his ignorance, intentional or not, of science.

“It is clear that the judge disregarded the strong medical argument that we presented in our amicus brief,” declares the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in a statement typical of this line of argument. “Medication abortion has played a critical role in helping people continue to access needed abortion care. It also provides people with an alternative to an abortion procedure; in fact, more than half of people who receive abortion care choose medication abortion.”

Now it is true that abundant medical evidence is on the side of the defendant, the FDA. Mifepristone is safer than penicillin. Serious side effects occur in a fraction of a percent of medication abortions. Carrying a pregnancy to term is far riskier than ending one in abortion.

And it’s true that Kacsmaryk leapt miles outside his mandate and his expertise (if he has any). His 67-page opinion contains every scrap of junk science heaped up by the plaintiffs, the hastily assembled Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.

But is anyone under the illusion that the judge believes any of these alternative facts?

He knows, we know, that it’s all politics. As for the actual facts — that mifepristone makes abortion more convenient, less painful, and more effective, that the medication has been used in five million U.S. abortions since its approval — these are precisely the data the forced motherhood movement uses against mifepristone, to show that it trivializes and maximizes the extermination of the unborn.

The pro-abortion discourse conjures an image of the robed, Marine-barbered ideologue struggling mano a mano with a lab-coated nerd brandishing “Gray’s Anatomy” — the evil politicized judiciary versus the pristinely impartial biotechnocrats. Reproductive rights advocates root for science to save abortion from right-wing politics.

History belies this distinction. At every regulatory agency — the FDA perhaps more than most — politics and science mix, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict. This is not a problem. In a democracy, it’s how it should work. And it’s how the left should think, not just to win back mifepristone, but also to achieve lasting reproductive justice.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which led to the creation of the agency now called the Food and Drug Administration, was the product of a quarter-century of muckraking journalism about snake oil and chickenless potted chicken, of crusading Christian women and Senate floor showdowns between straight-whiskey state senators and blended-whisky state senators. In short, of politics. And “since then,” reads the agency’s website, “the FDA has changed along with social, economic, political and legal changes in the United States.”

As the government’s guardian of almost everything that touches our bodies, from bottled water to blood plasma, the FDA is the chief agent of public health law and policy. Public health, by definition, is a hybrid of social priorities and persuasion (politics) and preventive health and medicine (science). Just like the courts, the regulatory agency is a place where activists, consumers, corporations, bureaucrats, scientists, and politicians duke it out over bodily autonomy, capitalist exigencies, and public good.

How is this power struggle refereed? “An ideal arrangement would ensure that the FDA’s decisions remain accountable to public values while limiting the extent to which inexpert or conflicted political actors can influence those decisions,” Holly Fernandez Lynch, Steven Joffe, and Matthew S. McCoy, ethicists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, wrote in Nature Medicine. The authors propose a “division of labor,” where the scientists “make decisions about particular product applications, [and] elected and appointed officials . . . have a role in setting broader policies to guide those staff decisions.”

Congress makes the laws that articulate the mission and purview of the agencies. The president appoints the commissioners and may issue executive orders. Both draw the outlines for the regulators to fill in with details as conditions change. The voters hold these elected officials accountable. The courts hold the system in check. But, Lynch told me, no judge is free to second-guess technical and scientific decisions, as Kacsmaryk did. Numerous federal cases have stressed the “deference” the courts must extend to regulators’ expertise.

This dividing line between science and politics is not straight or impermeable. “The scientists determine whether a drug is safe and effective. But how safe is safe enough? How effective? Reasonable people disagree,” Lynch continued. “You need data, but the data alone can’t tell you whether to approve a drug. They are normative decisions, policy decisions. We the American people should have a say.” Industry — agribusiness, coal lobbies, Big Pharma — tries to have its say too.

Plus, policy decisions often have to be made on the fly during health crises. In drug approval, a big trade-off is “speed versus caution,” Lynch told me.

We saw multiple pressure campaigns play out in the Covid-19 pandemic, on both sides. The Trump administration joined anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists in hyping hydroxychloroquine as a Covid remedy and then pushed for its reauthorization after the FDA revoked emergency clearance when data showed it was not just ineffective against the coronavirus, but potentially dangerous as well. The Trumpians also tried to rush approval of vaccines in advance of the 2020 presidential election, before they were fully vetted. In 2022, a House subcommittee reported that the White House had “deliberately and repeatedly sought to bend FDA’s scientific work on coronavirus treatments and vaccines to [its] political will,” according to its chair.

Public health is always political.

“I think we can all agree that the issue of hydroxychloroquine has become politicized,” Trump’s FDA commissioner, Stephen Hahn, told ABC News in July 2020. “And it’s a shame because … public health emergencies shouldn’t be about politics.” This statement was followed by a long justification of the agency’s actions. Public health is always political. It requires positive, consistent messaging; misinformation control; reinforcing alliances; and discrediting detractors.

Democrats, for their part, overplayed the effectiveness of vaccines and downplayed positive research on “natural immunity” to Covid, host Meghna Chakrabarti recently argued in public radio’s “On Point.” “When absolutist politics from both Republicans and Democrats met an evolving understanding of Covid and natural immunity, what the country was left with was a hot mess of botched leadership and public health communication,” she said.

One of Chakrabarti’s guests, a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee under Joe Biden, pushed back on the term “natural immunity” and the implication of political malfeasance: “My particular phrase in 2020 [was] ‘survivor-induced immunity.’ I mean, we never say … natural immunity from polio … because if you were naturally immune to polio, you may have been paralyzed.” With vaccination rates already suppressed by disinformation, the Biden administration wasn’t keen on encouraging people to forgo the shot, get sick, and pray to come out alive and immune. Did Biden, like Trump, take his own and his party’s political interests into account? It would be crazy not to, since trust in the administration’s credibility and leadership were critical to managing the pandemic response.

AIDS activist group ACT UP protests at the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration on Oct. 11, 1988, in Rockville, Md.

Photo: Catherine McGann/Getty Images

Probably no public health issue drives people as crazy as sex. So it is impossible to remember a single sex- or reproduction-related medical substance, device, or procedure that has escaped pressure campaigns and political combat. First, the Catholic Church vigorously opposed the pill. Then, in the late 1980s, the anti-abortion movement began steering federal and state policy on embryonic stem cell research; it still does. But sex-aversive politics do not come only from the right.

Case in point: emergency contraception. The morning-after pill was approved, with a prescription, for adult women in 1999. The Center for Reproductive Rights, or CRR, sued to have it released over the counter without age restriction. George W. Bush’s FDA slow-walked the drug’s release. After five years of go-aheads and backtracks, the agency’s top women’s health official resigned in protest. In 2009, a federal judge found excessive political interference. In 2011, after reviewing a decade of data, the FDA recommended the sale of the medication over the counter for all girls and women. Then, Barack Obama’s Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, countermanded the FDA decision, citing concerns about the health of younger teens. Obama supported her decision “as a father of two daughters.”

Denouncements flew. Days later, the administration unveiled a “compromise”: Plan B One-Step would be available to women 15 and older with photo ID proving age — something not many teenagers possess. The manufacturer was peeved. CRR sued. Still, everyone figured the whole thing was just preelection politicking — Obama was running against the Mormon Mitt Romney — and that the court would rule for the plaintiffs. We thought Obama, if reelected, would defer, because that’s what he’d wanted to do all along. This did not happen. The same judge called the administration’s policy “arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable” and reinstated the FDA’s earlier recommendation. The administration appealed and lost again. And in June 2013, after 14 years of haggling, the morning-after pill was put on pharmacy shelves for anyone to carry to the cashier and purchase.

Another morning after — after Dobbs overruled Roe — women started stocking up on emergency contraception. The FDA relabeled the pills to clarify that are not abortifacients; they stop ovulation, not implantation of the egg in the womb. But the antis persist in calling it an abortion pill. The saga is not over.

Of course, politics aren’t just for politicians, and regulation isn’t just for regulators and the regulated. And when none of these parties will move, direct political action is the necessary, right response. While thousands dropped dead from AIDS, the FDA under Ronald Reagan and Bush did nothing. Drugmakers and the FDA moseyed forward at their usual, cautious pace. ACT UP fought back.

From its first meeting in 1987, it led marches and die-ins, worked the phones to the press, and created some of the century’s best political art and agitprop theater, all focused on forcing the government to pay attention, spend money, and get “drugs into bodies” — now. At the same time, ACT UP’s Treatment and Data group schooled itself in immunology and the complexities of the FDA’s drug-approval process, infiltrated the research elites, and designed programs and protocols that put patients first. The activists demanded accelerated approval and compassionate use of experimental drugs for people with serious or fatal, as-yet-incurable diseases; broadly inclusive clinical trials; and close consultation with affected communities, including poor people of color, IV drug users, and women.

The climactic 1988 action, Seize Control of the FDA, was a spectacle of official resistance to these aims and to the despised populations demanding them. Workers stood behind unopenable windows gazing down on demonstrators carrying signs reading “time is not the only thing the FDA is killing,” shouting “drugs into bodies,” and “do your job,” and being carried off by police.

But with astonishing speed, most of ACT UP’s demands were met. Today, many are standard FDA policies. These victories took more than persuading the regulators to do the right thing. ACT UP, a largely white, gay group, reached out to diverse constituencies — communities of color, harm reduction and patient advocates, human rights activists — to awaken public sympathy and shame political actors. The activists were armed with science. But it was unrelenting grassroots organizing; smart propaganda; public education; and noisy, fierce, nonviolent direct action — politics — that turned the ship of state.

Among abortion’s defenders, dueling strategies have emerged. One camp, which includes the mainstream advocates, the Department of Justice, and Department of Health and Human Services, is doing what the mainstream has done for 50 years: go to court. Another, smaller group, whose arguments have been advanced mostly by three Pennsylvania legal scholars, favor a more direct route: Pressure the FDA to exercise its enforcement discretion — that is, the statutory authority to use its limited resources to crack down on some unapproved drugs and leave others alone. The Supreme Court, after all, has ruled that the FDA’s enforcement discretion is not reviewable by the courts.

The first camp accuses the second of acting rashly, politicizing the issue, and threatening the rule of law. Jennifer Dalven, who directs the American Civil Liberties Union Reproductive Freedom Project, “pooh-poohed” the other strategy, as MedPage Today put it. “Taking some sort of non-enforcement action or ignoring the decision, as some have called for, won’t answer all of the problems, both legal and otherwise, that this creates, including the dangerous precedent that this sets for all other drugs in the approval process,” she said. Kamara Jones, Health and Human Services’s acting assistant secretary for the public affairs, tweeted, “People are rightly frustrated about this decision — but as dangerous a precedent it sets for a court to disregard FDA’s expert judgment regarding a drug’s safety and efficacy, it would also set a dangerous precedent for the Administration to disregard a binding decision.” She did not mention that other binding decision, from Washington state.

Camp two reject the charges. “[Our proposal] is not radical,” Drexel University law professor David S. Cohen, one of the three lawyers, told Politico. “These are real strategies within the law.”

And politicization is not the problem, he told me. It’s the solution: “What we’re stressing is that there are political strategies available right now. Meaning we need to put pressure on political actors rather than just to let the lawyers file their briefs and sit back and see what happens.”

Like me, Cohen is not sanguine about seeing what happens when mifepristone meets Samuel Alito. But even if the Supremes uphold Kacsmaryk’s decision, a unique political alliance exists to be mobilized. Pharma is flipping out. More than 400 drug and biotech executives signed a letter condemning the Texas ruling as a mortal threat to the stability of their industry and thus its investment and innovation. This is one of the rare times in political or regulatory history that corporations and humans are on the same side. Danco, the manufacturer of the brand name mifepristone Mifeprex, could apply for fast-track approval, the FDA could review the 20 years of data it has on file, and the drug could be back on the shelves within the year. Danco has an economic incentive to act quickly. But regulators need pushing.

“Political pressure is a role for everyone,” Cohen said. “To me that’s a much more active and involved and hopeful strategy.” Science is critical to winning the day. But science won’t move anyone or anything if no one moves the scientists to act.

The post Politics, Not Science, Will Win the Battle for Mifepristone appeared first on The Intercept.

Dominion Was Never Going to Save Our Democracy From Fox News

Peter Maass — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 21:16:29 +0000

Lawyers representing Dominion Voting Systems talk to reporters outside the Leonard Williams Justice Center following a settlement with Fox News in Delaware Superior Court on April 18, 2023 in Wilmington, Del.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Will private equity save American democracy?

That question, which has lurked behind the defamation lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems filed against Fox News, was answered today in an unsurprising fashion: no.

Fox and Dominion reached a $787.5 million settlement just moments before opening arguments were set to begin in the Delaware trial. A jury had been selected, and everyone was preparing for what seemed likely to be a six-week trial that would scrutinize Fox’s broadcasting of false conspiracy theories that Dominion machines stole votes from then-President Donald Trump in 2020. Dominion was seeking $1.6 billion in damages from Fox.

The settlement is not a total shocker. Just days ago, there was a flurry of speculation that Fox wanted to settle, with the goal of avoiding a court’s verdict that it had lied with malice when it aired false accusations — from its hosts and guests like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani — that Dominion had tried to rig the presidential election.

The settlement is unlikely to be welcomed by Fox critics who believed that a guilty verdict would serve a mortal blow to the network’s reputation. The idea was that Fox, on the ropes, should not be allowed to slip away by writing a settlement check and mumbling an insincere apology. As a headline from The New Republic pleaded amid the settlement rumors a few days ago, “Don’t Settle, Dominion! Drag Fox News Across the Coals.” It argued that with a guilty verdict, “we will be able to say, with a certainty we can’t quite claim now, that Fox News lies.”

Dominion does not exist to serve the public interest. It is a for-profit company owned by a small private equity firm.

But Dominion does not exist to serve the public interest or liberal magazines. It is a for-profit company owned by Staple Street Capital, a small private equity firm. Staple Street has fewer than 50 employees and claims $900 million of assets under management (a modest amount in its industry). It was founded in 2009 by Hootan Yaghoobzadeh and Stephen D. Owens, who previously worked at Carlyle Group and Cerberus Capital Management, giants in private equity. Yaghoobzadeh and Owens graduated from Harvard Business School and have no records of political donations or political activity; they are business people, not pro-democracy agitators.

The size of the settlement represents a windfall on Staple Street’s investment in Dominion: Its controlling stake cost just $38.3 million in 2018, according to a filing in the case. While Dominion’s lawsuit has attracted an enormous amount of attention, it’s actually not a large company, as the market for its vote-counting services is limited; its expected revenues in 2022 were just $98 million, according to the filing.

While Dominion and Staple Street have not explained why they agreed to the settlement, the rationale is pretty clear. Their case was strong, but it wasn’t certain that a jury would deliver as much as they were seeking, and it also was not certain how quickly they might see any award, as Fox would likely appeal. The owners of Staple Street — along with John Poulos, who is Dominion’s chief executive and has a 12 percent stake in the firm — were unlikely to have been strapped for cash before the settlement, but now their companies will reap an immediate and significant bounty. In its discovery efforts, Fox unearthed a text message from a former Staple Street employee to a current executive that noted, “Would be pretty unreal if you guys like 20x’d your Dominion investment with these lawsuits.”

Speaking to reporters after the settlement was announced, a lawyer for Dominion, Justin Nelson, said, “The truth matters. Lies have consequences.” A statement from Fox said, “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”

It’s not uncommon for a company to turn its back on the public good for the sake of enriching its owners (a transaction that’s traditionally known as maximizing shareholder value). That’s essentially what happened, for instance, when Twitter’s board eagerly decided to sell the company to Elon Musk for the generous sum of $44 billion. The board lunged at the lucrative transaction even though it was widely predicted that Musk would diminish the usefulness of the social media site, which has indeed happened (Musk recently admitted the company is now worth half as much as he paid for it).

A mobile billboard deployed by Media Matters circles Fox News Corp. headquarters on April 17, 2023 in New York City.

Photo: Getty Images for Media Matters

Triumph of American Capitalism

The discovery process that preceded the trial’s opening was a nightmare for Fox, because it exposed in detail the levels of deceit practiced by hosts and executives as they pumped out the conspiracy theory that Trump actually won the 2020 election. But those disclosures appear to have had zero impact on the network’s ratings, which remain strong. While Fox’s reputation is at rock bottom with its critics, its viewers have remained loyal, and it’s not clear that a jury’s verdict would have influenced them any more than the bounty of evidence that emerged in discovery. It’s pretty certain, however, that a settlement will have even less sway.

The high hopes that were riding on the trial reflected the exasperated state of the longtime — and so far unsuccessful — effort to counteract the deceptive and racist programming that has been Fox’s hallmark since its founding in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch, who is now 92 years old and oversees the network with his eldest son, Lachlan (both were deposed and were expected to testify in the trial). Despite years of criticism from journalists and politicians — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., memorably described Fox as a “hate-for-profit racket” — the network has prospered. While most advertisers have fled its airwaves, Fox remains profitable because the bulk of its income consists of exorbitant payments from cable and satellite providers (so-called carriage fees). Despite several years of attempts to pressure those companies, there has been little success, though a renewed push is underway.

“Cable and satellite providers have to stop paying Fox News the carrying fees that are really Fox’s bread and butter, far more than ad revenue,” noted The New Republic. “If the jury finds against Fox, pressure must mount for that to end as well.”

These hopes, while widely held among Fox’s detractors, constitute the kind of magical thinking that circled around earlier efforts to undo the lies and violence of the Trump era. Just as the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller failed to deliver the knockout blow that was hoped for by its supporters, the now-settled lawsuit filed by Dominion is unlikely to alter the nature of Fox News, as the network has escaped the legal, moral, and financial punishment of a judicial verdict. We probably shouldn’t be surprised by this outcome: One terrible limb of American capitalism was always unlikely to save us from another terrible limb.

The post Dominion Was Never Going to Save Our Democracy From Fox News appeared first on The Intercept.

10 Years After My Cancer Diagnosis, the Right Is Still Trying to Kill Me

Jon Schwarz — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 10:00:16 +0000

The dermatopathologist’s cancer diagnosis for Jon Schwarz in April 2013.

Photo: Jon Schwarz/The Intercept

This is an update of a piece I wrote in 2013. Unfortunately, the exact same issues still exist now.

Many people hate April 15 because of taxes. But I love it for not having cancer, because (KNOCK ON WOOD) I haven’t had cancer since tax season 10 years ago today.

Early in 2013, I looked at the back of my right calf and thought, “Huh. That looks weird. Has that always looked like that?”

At the time, I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at the back of my calves. I’m sure you don’t spend a lot looking at yours. Kind of like the dark side of the moon, they’re on the dark side of your body. And they’re not interesting enough to make a special effort. What do the backs of our calves do all day long? Who knows, they could be plotting to overthrow the government and we’d never notice.

But for some reason, I did look at the back of my right calf. And I noticed that a mole I’d had there for my whole life looked slightly different. Or did it? I wasn’t sure. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d looked at this mole since the Clinton administration. But whatever it used to look like, now it looked sort of … like it was splitting in half. Like one side was making a break for it and heading around my leg toward my shin.

Or maybe not. Maybe what I’d thought was one mole had always been two overlapping moles and I hadn’t ever noticed. Maybe?

Then I thought, “Maybe I should go to a dermatologist.”

So I eventually made a dermatologist appointment, an appointment 10 years ago right now. And the most important thing about the way I made that decision, which plausibly saved my life, is that I wasn’t worried at all. I wasn’t worried enough to hurry; it took me six weeks to get around to it. I wasn’t worried when the dermatologist looked at it and said he’d go ahead and slice it off. I wasn’t worried when the phone rang a week later and it was the dermatologist, calling me directly.

What I’d always heard about waiting for results from medical tests is that you want a nurse or receptionist to call you. You definitely don’t want to hear from the doctor themselves. Yet I was so totally unworried that when I heard the doctor’s voice, that never crossed my mind. To the degree I thought anything, I thought, “Wow, this guy is such a caring physician that he makes a point of calling patients to tell them that they’re perfectly fine.”

That was not why he was calling. He was calling to tell me that my weird-looking mole was malignant melanoma, i.e., the type of skin cancer that kills you. Unless it’s caught at the very beginning, which mine was. Then (if you’re lucky like me) they send you to have a big chunk cut out of the site of the melanoma to make sure they got it all, and you look like you got bitten by a shark, and then the receptionist calls to say there were no malignant cells in the chunk, and doctors tell you, “You need to come get looked at even three months, and wear a lot of sunscreen.”

And that’s the thing about melanoma, which you probably don’t know unless you’ve spent many bleary nights reading every single website on the internet that mentions it. It’s not just that it’s the most dangerous of the three kinds of skin cancer, causing 80 percent of skin cancer deaths. It’s that if it escapes from your skin into your lymph nodes, it’s sometimes more dangerous than many other types of cancer. For instance, the survival rates for stage II melanoma are the same or worse than for stage III breast cancer.

But on the other hand, survival rates in its earliest forms are very high. In my case, I learned, there was only a 7 percent chance it would kill me in the next 10 years. Now those 10 years are up, and I’m extremely happy to have not beaten the odds.

So if ever there were a cancer where early detection makes all the difference, it’s melanoma. If I hadn’t gone to have my weird-looking mole examined, eventually one day, a clump of malignant cells would have migrated from my skin to elsewhere in my body and quietly begun multiplying. Would that have taken six months, three years, five years? There’s no way to know. But then I would have been looking at prognosis charts with survival numbers like 67 percent, or 49 percent, or 34 percent. The difference between that and being cancer-free was a five-minute procedure in a suburban office building on a Monday.

That’s why it’s so important to understand how unworried I was. I wasn’t $400 worth of worried, or $100 worth of worried, or even $20 worth. I wouldn’t have gone to the dermatologist if I didn’t have health insurance. I probably wouldn’t have gone if I had insurance but it had a big deductible or even any real copay. The only reason I went to have my life saved is because it cost me zero dollars.

And the reason it cost me nothing is because I was then working for Dog Eat Dog Films, Michael Moore’s production company, and had America’s best health insurance. Moore didn’t just make an entire documentary, “SiCKO,” about our disastrous health insurance system, he did his best to make sure his employees didn’t experience it. My coverage had no deductible, and most doctor’s visits had no copay. (The dental coverage was great too — I had three wisdom teeth removed for a total cost to me of $242.) I’d never had insurance like this before in my life and probably never will again unless I move to Ontario.

So you can understand why ever since, I’ve closely followed the GOP’s attempts to destroy the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. With my melanoma diagnosis, I suddenly became much more interested in everything about health care policy, in the same way you’re suddenly much more interested in the safety instructions in the seat back in front of you when the pilot announces you’re ditching in Lake Superior. And every time Republicans have gone on TV to talk about this subject, what I’ve heard them say is, “We very much want to kill you, Jon Schwarz.”

That’s because Obamacare required insurance companies for the first time to cover everyone, regardless of any preexisting conditions. There’s no more disqualifying condition than cancer; without Obamacare, I would now likely be essentially uninsurable if someday in the future I need to get insurance on the individual market. And we know what happens to people without health insurance in the United States: they die.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t understand Obamacare’s many grievous flaws. But they’re not flaws of going too far; they’re flaws of not going nearly far enough.

To this day, I often think about the thousands of Americans walking around with undiagnosed, early melanomas who could be cured in five minutes. Some of them think something might be wrong but aren’t doing anything because they have no insurance or bad insurance. Is it you, 28-year-old woman in jeggings who’s clearly spent too much time at a tanning salon? Or maybe it’s you, middle-aged dad I saw carting around three kids at the grocery store while getting instructions on your cellphone on what brand of spaghetti to buy. Or you, the 60-year-old cashier at the Indian restaurant who gave me the extra order that someone else never picked up. These thoughts about this unnecessary suffering torment me. If that sounds overwrought to you, I’m guessing you’ve never looked at a pathology report with your name on it that says “diagnosis: malignant.”

And the awful truth is that while Obamacare may save some of those people, it won’t save them all — because although it will help nearly everyone get some kind of insurance, it won’t help everyone get good insurance, the kind that saved me. Some of them will look at their strange asymmetric mole and their $2,000 deductible and won’t be $2,100 worth of worried until it’s too late.

The U.S. right has a phrase they like to use about health care, which is that Americans need more “skin in the game.” This means that the real problem with our system is that regular people don’t have to pay enough, that we “buy” health care like we do clothes or cars, and we’ve been getting too much because insurance makes it seem so cheap. But as someone with some nonmetaphorical skin in the game, I can tell you this isn’t just wrong, it couldn’t possibly be wronger. People don’t want to go to the doctor. They don’t go get pointless chemotherapy instead of going to Six Flags, because chemotherapy and Six Flags are both the same amount of fun but chemotherapy’s cheaper. I didn’t have to pay anything to see a doctor, and because of that, it cost the health care system about $5,000 to treat me. If I’d delayed because I had to pay, it easily could have ended up costing the system $500,000 worth of interferon, CT scans, and radioimmunotherapy, plus the additional downside of me being dead. Multiply that by millions of people and you’ll understand why the right’s crusade against health insurance is more than just evil and cruel, it’s evil, cruel, and incredibly stupid.

The U.S. right has momentarily given up on killing Obamacare all at once and is now attempting to kill it off in pieces. Meanwhile, there’s little interest from Democrats in improving it.

That means it’s up to us. We have to keep fighting, to get rid of the bad parts of Obamacare and keep and improve the good parts, so the Affordable Care Act is just the first step to the only system that’s ever worked anywhere on Earth: universal, high-quality health insurance and health care for everyone. And while we’re working on this, seriously, please, please use lots of sunscreen and don’t skimp on dermatologist appointments.

The post 10 Years After My Cancer Diagnosis, the Right Is Still Trying to Kill Me appeared first on The Intercept.

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